Weezie’s own questioning by the Vienna police continued as an ordeal, forcing her to stay in this city that now held such painful memories. It began at the scene at the time of the murder when Weezie told them quite honestly that she and Mr. Truman had been close, and she gave them her address at Fraulein Tatlock’s. Finally, after three weeks of periodic questioning, in which there had been no mention of Frank Burden, they returned her passport and said she was free to leave the city. The last night she was sitting with Fraulein Tatlock, thanking her for all she had done, and the cheerful lady looked at her and said, “Was it Frank Burden?”
Weezie was caught totally by surprise. “What on earth makes you ask that?”
“The descriptions.”
Weezie paused, looked the old Viennese in the eye, and took her hand and squeezed. “It is very, very important that you not think that.”
And Fraulein Tatlock said, “I understand.” And years later, when Eleanor Putnam Burden heard that there were rumors, she conjectured that Fraulein Tatlock had been the source, certainly not Sigmund Freud.
She bid a tearful farewell to Fraulein Tatlock and left, first by train to Paris, then by boat from Le Havre. During her month of forced stay and the passage home, she wrote continuously on music and Vienna and Gustav Mahler. In New York, on her way back to Boston, she stopped by the New York Times office and handed an editor the lengthy manuscript.
“Something of significance?” he said with a smile, remembering Weezie’s promise in going to Vienna in the first place.
Weezie shrugged. “Catharsis,” she said. “Jonathan Trumpp has written his last.”
The editor weighted the manuscript in his hand. “This is a whole book,” he said with an amazed and a proud smile.
“I wish it titled City of Music,” Weezie said with authority.
When Eleanor Putnam returned home, she was rarely called Weezie again. As time passed, she could recall the memories of her time in Vienna and with Wheeler Burden with poignancy, then joy, then inspiration. She could even revisit the fateful last moments outside Frau Bauer’s as she knelt beside him, this remarkable man who was the love of her life. As time passed, she remembered less and less the awful feeling of loss and more and more the beatific smile and the last words that held her entire future.
“We will waltz again,” he had whispered, words she now cherished above all others.
“I have an enormous responsibility,” she had said at the end, holding his hands, struggling to gain control, struggling to find that Athena strength he had said was within her all along.
Wheeler’s eyes were fixed on hers, and he could muster only enough strength to nod.
Her eyes were filled with tears now, but they shone with the ancient fierceness that came up from primordial fires. “You must know this,” she said, squeezing his hands. “It seems too much—”
“You are up to it,” he said with what breath he had left.
“Too much—” She paused. “But I can do it. You must know this, Wheeler Burden, the love of my life. You must know that I am up to the task, and I can do it.”
He smiled at her. “I know,” he whispered.
“I can do it for you. For all of us.”
“That’s good” were Wheeler Burden’s last words.
This time around.
Acknowledgments
This novel had its beginnings over thirty years ago when my friend Steve Cohen was reading Wittgenstein’s Vienna by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, and he and I began theorizing about transporting ourselves there. I was in graduate study at Stanford University that year, and during the spring term, I submitted the first draft of the story as an independent study for a visiting professor from Rutgers named George Levine. Over the years since then, as I expanded, refined, and embellished the story, I became grateful to many sources, among the best being the Janik and Toulmin book; Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, by Carl E. Schorske; The Eagles Die: Franz Joseph, Elisabeth, and Their Austria, by George R. Marek; The Viennese: Splendor, Twilight, and Exile, by Paul Hofmann; Freud: A Life for Our Time, by Peter Gay; and The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought, by my Princeton classmate Bill Everdell. It is the Schorske book especially that has most inspired me over the years and that first made me realize that fin de siècle Vienna was a rich time worthy of my greatest efforts. And it is Schorske’s book that served as model for the Haze’s magnificent “Random Notes” and Wheeler’s subsequent bestselling Fin de Siècle.
Wheeler Burden, of course, came to life over the years and developed an identity all his own, but the details of his story were enriched by three influences. Much of his early life comes from my growing up on a prune and almond farm in northern California and my journeying east to Boston for prep school. His middle years with baseball and music were inspired by my friend, another Princeton classmate, Doug Messenger. And his rock-star success, from Woodstock through Altamont and Berkeley, is inspired by another friend, David Crosby. To Doug and David I am grateful.
The novel’s discovery and success after all this time came about thanks to an extremely fortuitous sequence. My basketball friend Milt Kahn recommended a gifted freelance editor in New York named Pat LoBrutto. Pat was invaluable in helping me see and develop a unity within my story that had evaded me for thirty years. Pat recommended the manuscript to an extraordinary literary agent, Scott Miller, at Trident Media. Scott recommended it to my very talented and attentive editor, Ben Sevier, who presented it beautifully and passionately to his team at Dutton, and suddenly the project was on its way to becoming a book. The faith and enthusiasm that Dutton has shown for my novel has been overwhelming and heartening beyond words. During the long and arduous process of converting manuscript to book a number of people played key roles. I am indebted to Randall Klein at Trident; Brian Tart, Trena Keating, Erika Imranyi, Lisa Johnson, and Rachel Ekstrom at Dutton; and my readers Mike and Bobbi Wolf, Louis Sanford, Mallard Huntley, Susan Coats, Jano and David Tucker, Beth Clements, Barbara Kimmel, my sister Hannah, and fellow writer, Dan McCaslin, a Schorske buff. To this list I add Jim Davidson, a friend and patient advisor. My children, Nan Pickens, Paula Edwards, Kirsten and Bruce Edwards, sharp and perceptive readers all, lent loving support along with timely and wise commentary. And of course, my wife Gaby, ever the attentive and well-read English teacher and editor, read the manuscript aloud and attended to each page with devoted care.
Since this is a life work, I feel obligated to express my gratitude to influences over my lifetime of loving history, fiction, and stories. I am grateful to Sydney Eaton and Timothy Coggeshall, my English teachers when I myself, at my “St. Gregory’s,” was rough-hewn from the California provinces. During those years, I was profoundly influenced by my own legendary headmaster, Eliot Putnam, and deeply grateful for friendships, especially those of Mike Deland and Jim Wood, who lent names and details to this story. In my years as an English teacher I fell in the thrall of Mark Twain, Arthur Miller, J. D. Salinger, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Irving, and Pat Conroy; and during those years in school I have been fortunate to know and call as friends a number of distinguished writers: In this regard, I am grateful to Max Byrd, Barnaby Conrad, Oakley Hall, Richard Ford, and Beth Gutcheon. Also during those teaching days, I had the luxury of colleagueship with a number of very special teachers and lovers of the literary dialogue, among whom were Stan Woodworth, Joe Caldwall, Ed Hartzell, Bill Nicholson, Barclay Johnson, Katherine Schwartzenbach, Cathy Rose, and Barbara Ore. Late in my career, my experience at Pacifica Graduate Institute enhanced and deepened this novel in both obvious and subtle ways. I am grateful to my Pacifica teachers and classmates in general and to Dennis Slattery, Bobbi Wolf, Al Smith, Bill Drake, and JoAnn Carney in particular.
It is a great personal sadness that my mother and father are not alive to see this lengthy project come to fruition, as they were the ones who encouraged all four of their children to make the most of the superb education they provided and to pursue a life
of learning and books and service to others. Deepest gratitude also goes to my three wonderful children: Nan, Bruce, and Paula have been a joy and inspiration to their parents from the moment of their births. And for her encouragement, inspiration, support, and unconditional love, I wish to express my boundless indebtedness to my wife, Gaby. This book, the fulfillment of life aspirations too complicated and numerous to describe here, satisfies at least one very simple and expressible goal: the enduring fifty-year dream of dedicating a novel, my own “something of significance,” to her.
About the Author
Selden Edwards began writing The Little Book as a young English teacher in 1974, and continued to layer and refine the manuscript until its completion in 2007. It is his first novel. He spent twenty-five years as headmaster at several independent schools across the country, and now lives in Santa Barbara, California.
The Little Book: A Novel Page 44