“These are extraordinary times,” Dilly said.
“I am glad that you are content with a minor role in these last months. I fear things will not be pretty before the peace.”
“The peace?” Dilly said innocently.
“The invasion is coming. We all know that. Eisenhower’s attack will be enormous, and Hitler’s defense will be ferocious. Both sides will exhaust themselves, I fear, and there will be a negotiated peace.”
“You think the invasion will fail.”
Frank Burden took a long appraising look at his son. “Hitler’s defenses are stronger than anyone knows. So much emphasis has been put on air power that everyone has forgotten where his power really lies. It is in the tanks, his Panzer divisions. They are exceedingly mobile and can be moved anywhere in Europe in a matter of days. That is what the Autobahns are for.” Frank Burden looked into his son’s eyes. “The Panzer divisions are the key to the whole thing.”
“But the invasion force is stronger than anyone realized,” Dilly said.
“I’m merely talking strategy,” Frank said. “The invading forces will be successful in the opening days, then the Panzers will attack, right at the time when the invasion forces are most vulnerable, before the supply lines are established.”
“Are you saying the invasion will be a failure?”
The father could see the look of shock in his son’s eyes. “Standish, Standish, I am just being a realist. I am an American, a patriot, you know that. But we must prepare for reality. Hitler will sue for peace, and Franklin and his friend Winston Churchill will come to their senses. We will all come to our senses. The war will be over in a year, and both sides will lick their wounds and begin the recovery.”
“The Germans will stay in France?”
“European borders,” Frank said dismissively. “They change every hundred years. Look at what we now call Italy. Look at what used to be Austria-Hungary. ”
“I can’t believe you are saying this,” Dilly said.
“Realism, my son. Simply realism. The new Europe is coming, and we need to position ourselves. That is why you need to stick to your minor role right now, and you need to prepare yourself.”
“Prepare myself?” Dilly said, not understanding.
“You are being watched, believe me. You have been watched all along: the football, the music, the catch you made against Yale, that law school brilliance, now the war heroics. Believe me, my son, people have noticed. When the peace comes, there will be an international financial community, one of great power and reach.”
Dilly stopped him. “Are you saying that Berlin will control things?”
“Not Berlin,” Frank said confidently.
“London, then?”
Frank shook his head. “International banking, a new world order, a new way of doing things. You will be getting the call.”
“Wait,” Dilly said. “You’re losing me. Not London, not Berlin, then where?”
“Vienna,” Frank Burden said. “It is all set. The financial interests are ready to pull together and move there. That magnificent city with its rich history is now free.”
Dilly stared at his father, incredulous. “Free?” he said, dreading what was coming next.
Frank Burden tapped his cigar in the ashtray. “In the emperor’s Vienna there were two hundred thousand Jews. The Jews controlled everything, the newspapers, the arts, and especially the banks. They had a strangle-hold on it all. And now—” He tapped his cigar again. “Now, they are gone. The city is free. We funded him, and he has done his job, a little brutishly, I fear, but the job is done.”
“Wait,” Dilly said again, struggling to keep up. “You funded Hitler?”
“In the early days, when he was just getting started, there was a group of us who were well positioned. We made him, you might say, and I happened to be in the right position to pull it all together. Without that pulling together of banking interests, he would be—” Frank paused. “Well, he would have remained a former corporal and a failed postcard artist. We got him the money to found his Reich, and we got him the money for his Panzer tanks. It was an investment with enormous returns.”
“I can’t believe you are saying this,” Dilly said, staring in disbelief.
“Look, Standish, no one asked that it turn out this way, but a revitalized and industrialized Germany was an essential part of the formula. We all agreed on that. This is just simple reality. What has happened has happened. I am just advising you to the reality you might not have thought of. I am just encouraging you to keep your head down over there for the next few months. Wait it out. And when it is over, there will be a need for strong leadership. You will be getting a call. My son will be getting the call.” Frank Burden smiled proudly at his son. “I know because I know the people who will be making that call.”
Dilly could think of nothing to say. “Father,” he said finally, “Flora is a Jew. Your grandson is Jewish. The last Burden is a Jew.”
Frank Burden looked back at his son with that same matter-of-fact coldness, like a surgeon looking down at an inflamed appendix. “I have no grandson,” he said. “You are the last Burden.”
After he finished his story, Dilly was silent again, and Wheeler let out a soft sigh. “How horrible for you,” he said in little more than a whisper.
“Those were the last words I had with my father. It was at that awful moment that I decided to return to France and the Resistance.” Dilly’s head rested on the pillow. His eyes were closed and his lips puffed out with each breath. “That was when Mother told me that she and Frank Burden had lived very different lives, ‘parallel lives,’ she said. That was when Mother told me to go see Arnauld, alone.”
A long dark silence descended onto the room. “So you see,” he said slowly without looking over at Wheeler, using the compact language of someone who had few words left. “It appeared self-destructive perhaps. A mission of unreasonable risk.” He was coming near the end. “Not out of hatred for Hitler but, as Dr. Freud would pinpoint, to kill my father. But it wasn’t that. It was partly that I felt obligated to compensate for the awful influence of Frank Burden, granted, but there was more.” He fell silent again. Wheeler watched his own father and could see he was losing ground. His head barely came off the pillow now as he made his points, and his eyes became more and more hollow. “You know that your mother always blamed my tightly wound sense of duty, but this time it was more. I wanted to go because of what my father told me, yes. I wanted to go for the most sacred of reasons.” Wheeler said nothing, just let him continue. “I wanted to go for my son. I wanted to go for you.”
There followed another long silence, the two men just looking at each other, too far along now for any shyness. “Thank you,” Wheeler said. “It is the missing piece.”
“When I found out about my father, I thought the world had ended. Then I found out about the Haze and so very much fell into place for me. But, now, it doesn’t seem so important. Now that I have met you, I feel at peace. You are a good man, a tribute to your mother and me. I am so glad we met.”
“We’ve had a chance to see what each of us is like.”
“That is why I was sent here,” Dilly said in little more than a whisper. “A blessing for me.”
“You know,” Wheeler said, “I’ve never told anyone this, but when I edited the Haze’s ‘Random Notes’ in the seventies and eighties I found that the pages of that old loose-leaf binder were all different ages and conditions, and he was constantly changing the contents, over the years adding, subtracting, and consolidating from the boxes of papers in his closet. You could tell the progression of his thinking by the age of the paper. But what nobody knew was that the first page, the front of the Haze’s famous ‘Random Notes’ binder was the oldest and the most yellowed, the one that had been there from the start and had never changed. It was the dedication of a life’s work, I guess you’d say. And you know what it said?”
Dilly could barely move his head now. He nodded. “Tell.”
/> “It said, ‘To my son.’ ”
There was a stillness in the room that now had no time or place to it, an air that could only be described as sacred. “That’s good” was all Dilly said, but his smile told it all.
“You know I love you,” Wheeler said, reaching out and covering Dilly’s hand. “I have always loved you, Father.”
“That’s good,” Dilly repeated, then he whispered, “I love you—” He paused to savor the words. “—my son.”
“You’re slipping away,” Wheeler said, his eyes filled with tears. “You don’t have to, you know. There is a way—” There was now a desperation to his voice, and he leaned closer.
“It’s all right,” Dilly said, feeling the enfolding warmth of the hand, still smiling contentedly. “This time I’m trying for your mother.”
And Dilly Burden was gone.
PART FOUR
Fin de Siècle
54
A Powerful Resolve
As Wheeler stood at the window, taking in a last look out at the Danube Canal from the second-story window of his room at Frau Bauer’s, he felt heartsick about leaving Weezie. Once exhilarated by the thought of roving with Dilly, now he found there only a doubled sense of loss. The walls of his room were stripped bare and all that remained from his stay in Vienna was on the bed, a carpetbag with the few possessions he had managed to collect, including the suit he had stolen from Frank Burden on his first day and the journal, now safely back in his possession, into which he had written his last conversations with Dilly. For one last time Wheeler looked around the room that had been his home for this extraordinary time in Vienna, and his mind wandered as it had so many times back over the events and their causes.
His train ticket, one of two, was for Budapest. Why, he did not know really. It had been Dilly’s idea, seeming somehow more appropriate to head east for the time being, rather than to Paris or London. But first, if he showed up, he would travel with Freud to Lambach.
“What good will that do?” Dilly had asked in that last day, when he heard of the invitation.
“I honestly don’t know,” Wheeler said. “But maybe if we can get him to sense the deprivation the child is being raised in. Maybe that will change things, just slightly.”
“Better than strangling the little fellow?” Dilly had said, rolling his eyes. Wheeler had offered the trip in a very precise and narrow time frame. He had no idea of Freud’s response. “He must have started believing your reality. If he shows up that’s quite a statement: it’ll show that he finally understands.”
“I don’t think he will,” Wheeler said. “But at least I offered.”
Now alone, Wheeler looked around the room, and his mind wandered as it had so many times back over the events and their causes. Dilly’s death had come peacefully, as if he had quite literally run out of fuel. Wheeler had to keep reminding himself that this was the second time Dilly had died, and not only was it infinitely more peaceful and comfortable than the first, it also had followed a time in which they both had been granted a very special wish. It was indeed a second chance.
But still it was death. Wheeler sat with the body for a long time and wept, making his peace with the father he had never known. His mind kept drifting to his mother, Flora, and to how much both he and Dilly had wished that she could have been with them in Vienna. And why not? If he and Dilly had traveled, why not she? And what a time they would have had! It also occurred to Wheeler then that had Flora been with them, Dilly probably would have stayed. Instead, his body now lay cold and wax-like on the bed of his small dark rented room, while his spirit ranged out over time looking for his great lost love.
Wheeler had left Dilly’s room, dropping an unsigned note in the mailbox of the proprietor of the building, reporting that the man in the second-floor room had died, and leaving it up to the public officials of the city to establish the identity of the deceased. Dilly Burden’s expired body was of no use to anyone. “Maybe they will bury me in the unmarked grave beside Mozart,” Dilly had said in one of his last bursts of optimism.
With nearly unbearable heaviness of heart Wheeler collected his things to do what he knew he must: leave Vienna without a trace, to leave Weezie, once and for all. She had a new start on life now, and she was resilient and mature. The future had her marrying Frank Burden soon after their return to Boston, and there was nothing stopping that, nothing irrevocable or permanently damaging that had happened; in fact, there was no evidence that said everything was not according to the reality of history.
Except Weezie’s having read the journal; that was a problem. Her reaction had of course been almost unbearable to take in. She looked numb and confused, crushed by the weight of what she had read.
“You allowed me to call you by that other name.” She looked more sunken than angry. “Even in those moments of the greatest intimacy for a woman.”
“I had to.”
“Well,” she said, considering all the options. “Well, I guess it doesn’t change those moments.”
“I hope not.”
“You know,” she said, looking him straight in the eye, with a powerful resolve. “I am known to be very good in times of crisis,” she had told him. And all Wheeler could hope was that this would be for her one of those times.
He would never forget the image of her sitting by the studio window with the journal in her lap, her own mind racing with the extraordinary new information that now confronted her. How completely enervated she looked in the face of the awful knowledge. “I don’t care about this,” she said after a time, after she had collected herself. “I made my commitment to you when I came back to Vienna. We can get any money we need from my family, and we can go anywhere we need to go.” Her eyes shone with a bright confidence.
Wheeler did not know how even to begin. “You weren’t to have seen that,” he said dumbly. “I wrote it for my own sanity. It was incredibly careless of me to leave it where you could find it.”
“No,” she said, nodding with conviction. “I have become part of this story. It is important that I know the truth.”
“What do you make of it?”
“There are only two ways to make sense of it,” she said, struggling for self-control. “Other than the fact that it is a remarkably thorough and well-documented record, very hard to disregard. Either it is true, in which case its author is some sort of visitor from another time, or it is not true, in which case its author is certifiably mad.”
“Which do you think?”
“I honestly don’t know,” she said softly, “but considering the alternative, I prefer to think it true.” As she spoke, incredibly brave and positive, seated erect in the light from the window, Wheeler was overcome by how courageous she was and how much he loved her. It was not for the flow of history that he now feared, but for the emotional well-being of this woman he loved.
“I think you should give me the journal,” he said.
“That is possible.” She lifted it from her lap, closed it, and handed it to him.
“We should not see each other again,” he said, taking the journal and feeling its weight.
She let out a tiny gasp. “That is not possible.”
“It is necessary, though.”
“I think I would die if you left me now,” she said, her eyes now filling with tears. There was more concern than desperation in her voice. It was as if she was stating a fact about the weather or remarking on the color of the wallpaper.
Recognizing at once the truth behind what she said, Wheeler walked over to her and touched her hair. She looked up at him with a new depth in her blue eyes. He pulled her face to his chest and then bent down and kissed her. “What are we going to do?” he said from the bottom of his soul.
“Take me to bed.”
They lay in each other’s arms without speaking for what seemed like an eternity, with no need to part, with nothing of the outside world calling them away from each other.
“Your friend Dilly—” She paused and pulled herse
lf up bravely. “The one you say is my son. He is dying, isn’t he?” she said.
“I am afraid he is.” Finally, he was able to tell her the truth.
She winced. “Is there nothing to be done?”
“It appears not.”
“And when you die,” she said, her face buried in the nape of his neck, “is that how it will be for you?”
“Who’s to say?”
“I will be with you when it happens,” she said with a kind of conviction that resonated with the farthest stars.
“When the end comes and it comes suddenly, there is something you absolutely must know,” Wheeler said. She moved against him, her bare breasts against his chest, their legs intertwined, waiting for him to continue. “I have waited all my life to find love like this. Will you know that, confidently and completely?”
“I shall,” she whispered.
“Promise.”
“I absolutely promise,” she said, pulling herself even closer.
And it was in that moment that Wheeler knew that he would have to leave her and leave Vienna forever, regardless of the consequences.
55
A Classic Admiration
The decision to leave Vienna had settled on Wheeler with the heaviness of a death, yet he knew that leaving Weezie, allowing her to return to Boston, was the only plausible course now. He walked along the Ringstrasse with a sinking of heart like none he had ever felt before. He headed toward the Café Central for a good-bye visit, one last romantic gesture.
To understand what happened next you need to know one last detail of Wheeler Burden’s life. When his band Shadow Self parted company forever, it was not just the abandonment of performance music that called Wheeler. He began a project he had been putting off for a long time: the editing of the Haze’s “Random Notes.”
The project took him a full ten years, researching details, reading other accounts, interviewing St. Greg’s alums, immersing himself completely in the life that his old mentor had lived as a young man. Curiously, the only thing he did not do was travel to Vienna. “I don’t want to ruin it,” he said.
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