The Little Book: A Novel

by Edwards, Selden

  “Has it occurred to you that perhaps the other people you are referring to are too concerned about their own intrigues to notice anyone else’s?”

  That made her smile. “You are so good at seeing the lightness in all things. I do so appreciate that.” She paused as they walked along. “But still there are thoughts and worries that one cannot keep from revisiting.”

  “Perhaps those are the ones asking to be reexamined.”

  “Oh my,” she said in a little gasp. “That is awfully modern.”

  “Well, it is true. Let’s try one.”

  Weezie took a deep breath. “All right,” she said, summoning up her courage. “I keep reliving the awful scene with Herr Mahler. I can’t seem to get it out of my mind. I cringe when I think of the embarrassment.”

  “Why do you think you fainted?”

  “I cannot say. I just felt a rush in my head, and the next minute I was looking up at Herr Mahler and the maid from the chaise.”

  “What was happening as you began to swoon?”

  “He was showing me his music.”

  “Tell me the details.”

  “I had been standing beside him at the piano as he leafed through the sheets of music. He picked up one and began telling me about it, pointing out notes on the melody. I think he was assuming I was far more facile at reading music than I am.”

  “Did he touch you?”

  “He was leaning toward me. I could feel his arm against mine.”

  “And he was pointing with his finger?”

  “No,” she said, struggling to recall. “He had picked up a bone and he was pointing with it, tapping the sheet music. I think he was very excited—”

  “Wait,” Wheeler said. “He was pointing with a bone?”

  “No,” she said impatiently. “I said his baton.”

  “Go on,” Wheeler said.

  “He was tapping his baton on the sheet music and directing my eyes to the lines of melody, and I couldn’t focus on them. They began to swim in front of me.”

  “He was leaning into you, excited.”

  “He was very intent on having me see exactly what he had tried to do with his music. It was a Hungarian folk piece, and he wanted me to see how he had arranged the counterpoint.”

  “He was attracted to you.”

  “No. He was showing me the music.” She was looking a little flushed. “I was trying to follow, but I couldn’t keep up.”

  “Think about how he was touching you.”

  “It was just his arm against mine. Pressing closer so that I would follow his words. I could smell his breath.”

  “And he leaned closer.”

  She was looking very uncomfortable now. “His arm was against mine, and I could feel his side against mine. He is not a very large man. I mean he is wiry.”

  “You felt his leg against yours?”

  Perspiration had formed on her brow. “I think we must stop talking.” She reached for the glass of ice water.

  “You felt him pressing against you as he tapped the sheet music.”

  “I was trying to concentrate on the music. His words were enthralling. This was the great Gustav Mahler, and he was explaining to me how his melodies worked, and I tried to concentrate on his words, but I couldn’t. All I could feel was his breath, and—”

  “Him pressing against you?”

  “Yes. I wanted to stop. I wanted to see the music, but I couldn’t. I wanted to back away, but I couldn’t. And my head began to swim and my knees buckled, and—” She stopped, looking puzzled. “His arm,” she said suddenly. “I didn’t fall to the floor. His arm caught me. His arm had been around me. As I swooned, I felt him catch me. His arm—”

  “Go on.”

  “He had placed his arm around me, and his hand. His hand had slipped around—”

  “Go on.”

  “My head swam. It is not very clear. I can’t really remember it very well.”

  “His hand had slipped around, you said.” Wheeler was not letting her off.

  She struggled with the memory, fighting through layers of cobwebs. “He tapped the paper with the baton, and his words were getting more and more excited. He pulled me toward the music with his arm around me, and I tried to follow.”

  “And his hand?”

  “His hand had slipped from my shoulder. He was so very much involved in telling me about the music, he was not aware of what he was doing. And I was beginning to swoon, and his hand slipped—”

  “Keep going. Where was his hand?”

  “It had slipped to my bodice.” Wheeler didn’t speak. He just watched her running the thought through her head.

  “What was going on?”

  She seemed to be struggling. “He was excited about the music—” Wheeler wouldn’t take his eyes off her. “Herr Mahler was showing me—” Finally, she closed her eyes and pursed her lips. When she opened them, there was in them a new clarity. “Herr Mahler was seducing me.”

  “Why did I not remember?” she said later. “I honestly did not remember those details. It was like complete amnesia.”

  “And now?”

  “Now they are clear as day. I was standing beside him and he came closer and closer and put his arm around me and I started to swoon. His arm was around me and his hand moved to my bodice.”

  “Bodice?”

  “To my breast.” She smiled. “It is all so easy to say now that I have said it before.”

  “You are a very attractive woman,” Wheeler said. “Herr Mahler is a very temperamental and artistic man. He made a pass, we would say in California.”

  She wrinkled her brow. “But why did I not remember it that way? There are whole sections I just did not remember. And now they are lucid and clear.”

  “There is more,” Wheeler said.

  They had acquired a room in a hotel near the river. Weezie had stayed in the café while Wheeler had secured the room under the name Mr. and Mrs. Harry Truman. He and Weezie had walked quickly through the lobby and up the stairs. She sat on a cushion on the window seat where she had been for the better part of an hour. “I keep going back to my aunt Prudence.”

  “She is an awful woman.”

  “She meant well,” Weezie said quickly in defense.

  “I don’t think you have to stand up for her. She sounds harsh and cruel and unfair to a child.”

  “She meant well—” Weezie began again, and then stopped. “She was harsh and cruel.” She said it matter-of-factly, as if it felt good. “That is exactly what she was. And it is funny. I have never said that to anyone.”

  “It feels pretty good, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, it does. Aunt Prudence was harsh and cruel and unfair to a child.” She paused and looked down, as if knowing that more was expected of her at that moment. “She was dreadfully unfair to me.” The silence that ensued let the words settle, and then she began a gentle laugh. “And furthermore, she was a—”

  “Go on,” Wheeler said, smiling at her mirth. “Exactly what was she?”

  Weezie ceased her laughter, pulled herself up, and spoke with school-girl diction. “She was a witch.”

  “Are you sure?” Wheeler probed now in mock seriousness.

  “Absolutely,” she said, throwing her head back, laughing. “She was definitely a witch. She kept a broomstick in the closet.”

  She told in great detail the incident with the soap, how she had heard the story from the girls at Winsor School and how she had mentioned it at the dinner table and how Aunt Prudence had reacted and the awful taste of soap in her mouth.

  “How did your mother die?” Wheeler said suddenly.

  “Diphtheria,” she said without thinking. Then she looked amused with herself. “You know for years I thought she died from eating chicken at a picnic. I was only eight, you know, and I guess no one bothered to explain it to me.”

  “Eating chicken?”

  “Swallowing a bone. In fact, sometimes I have to catch myself even now. That image was so clear to me.”

&n
bsp; “Of dying from swallowing a bone?”

  “I know it’s odd. Just one of those things a little girl misconstrues, I guess. Someone must have said something to me that suggested it.”

  “What did the older girls say in the hallway at Winsor School?”

  Weezie looked puzzled. “They said, ‘Maybe she swallowed his bone.’ ”

  “Do you know what they were talking about?”

  She looked at him disgusted. “Well, I do now,” she said disdainfully. “I didn’t then.”

  “And they said you’d find out soon enough?” Weezie nodded. “And that evening you asked at the dinner table.” Weezie nodded. “What did you ask exactly?”

  “I told you. I asked what ardor meant.”

  “And your aunt hauled you off to the bathroom for the soap treatment? ” Weezie nodded again. “Isn’t that awfully harsh for one word? Even the Puritans used the word ardor in public.” She looked puzzled again. “Put yourself there again. Think about it.”

  “We were eating roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. I remember that. My father had just said he thought his sermon would be on forgiveness, and the thought just came to me. I asked it.”

  “How did you say it?”

  Weezie closed her eyes tightly. “I put my fork down. I reached for a glass of water,” she said slowly. “I said I had a question from school, and my father looked over at me and asked what it was. And I said—” She fought to recall it accurately. “I asked it.”

  “And exactly what did you ask?”

  Weezie paused and looked puzzled for a moment. “You know I don’t remember.” Then she spoke after another pause, curious about what came out. “I said, ‘What is a man’s bone?’ ”

  “And that is what sent your aunt Prudence into a rage?”

  “That’s it.”

  “And what did she say when she washed your mouth out?”

  “She said that Mother was willful and asked if I knew what God brought her?”

  “And you thought she died from eating a bone?”

  Weezie shook her head. It was going too fast. “The bar of soap, and the swallowing of the bone and the willfulness, and the picnic,” she said in little more than a mumble.

  “Your aunt told you. She said God killed your mother.”

  “She said it was her willfulness.”

  “You were eight at the time. You heard the older girls’ story.”

  “The dream. I go into the dark basement and my mother is in white at a picnic. She invites me to join her, and then she chokes on the piece of chicken.”

  “You want to join your mother.”

  “Yes.”

  “She is in light, at the picnic, the antithesis of your aunt Prudence’s darkness and black. She calls you to her.

  “What did your aunt say killed your mother?”

  “Willfulness.”

  “Keep going.”

  “The bone the girls were talking about.”

  “Keep going.”

  Weezie wrinkled her brow again, then a light came into her face. She shook her head slowly. “Sexual intercourse,” she said slowly. “It’s the one thing Aunt Prudence never had.” She looked up. “The witch made me believe that sexual intercourse killed my mother.”

  It was now late at night. Weezie had not moved from her place at the window seat. Wheeler was lying on his back sideways on the bed, looking up at the ceiling but listening to her attentively. She had gone over and over the details of how she had structured her own story from the events and from what her aunt had told her over the years. She had pieced together the very complicated sequence of incidents that had led her to believe that her mother’s sexuality had been both her great life force and the cause of her death. The force had drawn her toward it and repelled her. It had drawn her to Wheeler. It had drawn her into Herr Mahler’s advances and thrown her into a deathlike swoon. It had driven her out of the carriage and away from Vienna that night after the opera. And it had pulled her back.

  The puzzle was close to finished, waiting for the last fateful piece. Weezie’s face was drawn; her voice was without emotion, as she worked her way in the dimly lit hotel room. She went quiet for a long time. Then suddenly she spoke. “I am ready,” she said, and Wheeler rose from the bed and came over beside her.

  “I was in bed,” she said. She closed her eyes. The words came without expression. “I had been there for over an hour, unable to sleep, thinking about princesses in airy castles. I heard the footsteps on the stairs and thought it unusual because Father had already kissed me good night. The door creaked open and he said my name. I answered. He came over to my bedside, but did not turn on the gaslight. Light from the street came in the window and I could see his sad, careworn face. I was so happy he had come into my room. The times without Aunt Prudence between us, watching everything I said and did, were rare. ‘Sugar Plum,’ he said, ‘I am so very lonely.’ I could smell that he had been drinking, and he slurred his words, but I had become accustomed to that in the year or so following Mother’s death. I had also become aware of the sadness in Father’s face, and I would have done anything for him to make it go away. He touched my forehead, and I felt the sadness in his cold hands. ‘I am so very lonely,’ he kept repeating. I wanted so very, very much to take away the grief that had sat on him now for so long and that gave him so little reprieve. He lay down beside me and was still for a long time. I did not move, but I wanted to hold him, to make him whole again.”

  She stopped. The air in the room was dark and heavy. Wheeler did not move or speak. She was long past needing any prompting from him. “I hardly knew what was happening. It was not sudden or violent. I only knew that Father had come to me for the first time and the last time. It happened and I knew what the bone was and I could tell that Father knew it had killed Mother. And after he left I knew it would kill me. And as I lay there in the darkness waiting for death I hoped I would see Mother, and I hoped for Father to find peace.”

  Her hands were covering her face now and she wept, at first softly, and then with a wrenching violence that racked her body. It was some time before Wheeler moved to her and held her in his arms in the dim light of a rented hotel room in Baden in the year 1897. She wept in his arms, at first convulsively, then gently, before falling into a deep and peaceful sleep.

  On the train ride back to Vienna they sat across from each other, the only two passengers in their first-class cabin. Wheeler could not take his eyes off Weezie as she stared out the window with a soft smile on her lips. “What are you thinking?” he said.

  She turned her head ever so slowly, pulling herself back from a distant reverie. “It is hard to explain,” she said, “but for the first time in my life I can remember the golden years with Mother, without the black cloud. It’s as if the darkness has lifted.”

  Wheeler could not help smiling. “That’s the way it is supposed to work.”

  “You did it for me.” There was a look of the deepest love in her eyes.

  “I didn’t,” Wheeler said. “And I’m not being humble or coy. You did it for yourself. The hero must go it alone. That’s one of the oldest stories in the world. You searched in the corners and found what needed to be found. I just handed you the lantern.”

  “I love you very, very much.”

  Wheeler looked a little uneasy. “You know, you’re supposed to separate the two—the guide and the lover.”

  “I think that is too sophisticated for me. I just know I am not the same person I was, and it is only because of you. And what we have shared physically. I do love it so! Too much, I fear. It is such a wonderfully powerful part. I cannot imagine one without the other. You have opened me up, and I love you for that, and I will love you forever. I am absolutely, absolutely certain of that.” She refused to look away. “I will love you forever, no matter what you are or what you do or where you go.”

  For the first time, Weezie was beginning to sense Wheeler’s unusual circumstances. For a moment he just looked into her eyes. “There is something
I want you to have.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the packet in the embroidered handkerchief. “This was given to me by a very special person. I would like you to have it and keep it to remember this time. No matter.”

  Weezie took the packet apprehensively and slowly and carefully peeled back the layers of fine linen. When she came to the last layer, through which she could see an image of the contents, she let out a little gasp and looked up at Wheeler with an expression he would choose to remember forever, one of love and wonder. “What is it?” she said, lifting the last fold.

  The sight of the ring brought from her chest now an almost imperceptible sigh. She held it in her hand like a wonderfully colored bird, examining the details before speaking. “It’s incredibly beautiful.”

  “You’ll keep it then?” Wheeler said. “No matter.”

  Her voice was still more like a sigh. “No matter.”

  51

  The Legend of Dilly Burden

  Aren’t you angry about the way it turned out?” Wheeler said, as they sat in Dilly’s small room, Dilly on the bed and Wheeler on a chair beside the bureau. Dilly had not mentioned his condition again, but the dark shadows under his eyes had deepened and he seemed depleted of his usual boundless energy.

  “You mean the deception, the Churchill stuff?”

  “Well, your own side did turn you over to the Gestapo.”

  “For a greater cause,” he said with a shrug. “They knew I would crack. They knew the Gestapo would believe me because I believed. That was a brilliant strategy—a little diabolical perhaps—”

  “A little!”

  “—but look at all the lives it saved.”

  “But you were a pawn. You, the great Dilly Burden, of all people.”

  “Your mother pointed out that I was a pawn all along. The people of St. Gregory’s School needed a schoolboy hero to prove that their narrow way of looking at the world was right and proper. Then at Harvard I played into similar hands, always wanting to prove myself within the system, the system that had been around for three hundred years. My making such a success out of my career made the complacent old fogies even more complacent. God really did go to Harvard. I was a pawn in a huge game, and it didn’t really matter what I thought my duty was, the outcome was inevitable. My ‘rigid sense of duty’—as your mother called it—was my blinders. It kept me seeing the world the way I wanted it and kept me from looking into the heart of darkness.”