It was falling into place for the incredulous Dilly. “Mr. Churchill knew it.”
“It was a strategy not even the Nazis thought possible. No civilized people would purposely betray one of their greatest heroes.”
“And it worked?”
Wheeler nodded slowly. “Those Panzer divisions, all those fabled tanks that were supposed to drive away the invaders, they were never sent to Normandy, not on the day, not for weeks later. No one knows why. Hitler ordered them to sit tight at Calais. It made the whole invasion successful. ”
Dilly looked exhausted. He exhaled loudly. “Waiting for General Patton’s imaginary army.”
“And the world never knew,” Wheeler said. “They didn’t know about the deception, and they didn’t know you talked. The world thought you were the stoic hero who foiled the Gestapo. That’s what I grew up with. That’s what I had for a father.”
Now Wheeler was pausing and doing the thinking. “I have an image of this man who could withstand anything and never give in. That was what I thought my bloodline consisted of.” He laughed gently. “I can’t for the moment think of what it would be like without that image, that I had
that
blood in my veins. What if I had known? My father was this great iron-willed hero—”
Dilly stopped him with a raised hand, looking pained again. “As long as we are being honest here,” Dilly said, “there is more I need to tell you.” He was about to rid himself of a second great weight. “This has been quite a lot for me to take in, and for you.” Wheeler nodded. “There is one more detail. It involves the circumstances of your beginnings. You know that I love your mother very much, ‘very, very much’ as she would say, to distraction. And I loved you from the time before you were born, and I have considered you my son and heir, in every way. But—” He paused for breath. “That first time I went into occupied France, on a mission your mother thought foolhardy for a war she did not approve of, she expressed her exasperation and worry with a folly of her own. The night I left—she told me very honestly and candidly—she got roaring drunk and gave in to a randy ambassador’s son who had been pursuing her for some time. Your mother was a knockout, remember, a very good-looking girl. Quite a conquest. It was an event of one night’s duration, she admitted, and she never saw the man again. He was killed in the war. It was a mistake made in one moment of weakness, and one I cannot blame her for. The sequence of events, which I had plenty of time to contemplate in my recent incarceration, and—” Dilly looked down at his feet uncomfortably. “And what I know of myself. It all suggests strongly—confirms actually—that mine was not the sperm that made the ultimate contribution.”
Wheeler stared at him in silent disbelief. “You think that you are not my father?” He paused, just staring.
“Certain.”
“I can’t believe this,” Wheeler said.
“You are my son,” Dilly said in a burst, his confidence back. “I made your mother promise never, never to tell of any such doubt, and it sounds as if she kept that promise. You are my son, my one dear son, in the most wonderful of ways,” he said, looking into Wheeler’s eyes for signs that what he was expressing was understood. “It is just not in the biological one.”
Wheeler looked stunned. “Then that means—” He stopped himself short of expressing the thoughts of Weezie that raced into his mind, allowing Dilly to interpret in his own way.
“Sorry, old boy. But I had to tell you.”
Wheeler rolled his eyes and saw with his mouth open. “That’s all right,” he said calmly, his mind spinning. “It is just sort of a shock.”
“Well,” said Dilly, looking totally spent. “That is enough for one day, wouldn’t you say?”
“I’d say,” Wheeler said, his mind still spinning.
36
The Preconditions of Cultural Apex
There are considerable differences in Wheeler’s journal en-tries between before he began his sharing with Sigmund Freud and after. Some are subtle and some not very. The entries become more concise and probably more accurate, a little more self-conscious, and definitely more introspective after he began sharing them with the greatest mind of the twentieth century. One way or another, knowing that the great doctor was now hearing every word certainly quickens the pace and adds to the intensity of Wheeler Burden’s story.
The morning after his long talk with Dilly, after a night’s thinking and thrashing, Wheeler was up early, as was his wont, alone at the
Jung Wien
table in the Café Central, enjoying the time by himself and the chance to collect his thoughts in his journal. He was glad now that Weezie’s sudden departure had yanked him out of circulation and that in spite of his considerable heartache he was now no longer in the center of the story. The discovery of Emily James’s identity and its fateful implications, the painful loss of her, Dilly’s revelation of his betrayal by the Admiralty, the story of his conception, all rolled and rolled around in his mind in a jumbled mass, and he needed to stop and pull his thoughts together, take a deep breath, and to write.
“For you, talking is discovery,” Wheeler had been told by his old prep school mentor, and writing was not far behind. As he admitted in his journal entries, he did not know what was going to come out as he first laid pen to paper. And this particular morning he had much to discover. This morning he began conjecture about his father. Had he known from the start what he had just learned about his beginnings, the fact might have affected his life in very significant ways. All his life he felt special, with heroic, even mythic, blood flowing through his veins. His father was larger than life and had always risen to occasions and, in the end, had even withstood the worst tortures of the Gestapo. Wheeler knew that he, the Last Burden, would have done the same. Now, he had learned that his father was not his father and that the great Dilly Burden had been duped and betrayed by his own people, a victim of his own narrow sense of duty. This non-father had, like everyone else, given in to the horror of Nazi brutality and stumbled into giving them perhaps the most important false intelligence in the whole campaign. Wheeler felt both shock and relief. Why had his mother never told him about the ambassador’s son who was killed in the war? Was it really because of a promise made to her dead husband? Had his grandmother known that he was not his father’s son?
And what now of Eleanor Putnam? Wheeler admitted to a relief knowing that he was not really a Burden, that she was not really his grandmother, at least not technically, and that his aborted liaison with her was not incest. She was now safely on her way back to Boston, and he no longer needed to carry the weight of knowing how much they had fallen into each other’s auras and wondering constantly how he was affecting her and her future. He felt enormous intellectual relief that she was now gone and out of harm’s way. But that did little to assuage the gnawing sense of grief.
Rationally, Wheeler had concluded that there was nothing he could do about Weezie’s leaving. He would soon, he hoped, get over the gnawing feelings of longing and loss, and she would recover from whatever hurt she carried away. And he hoped that back in Boston she would proceed with life in such a way as to attract Frank Burden, a not-altogether-pleasant thought. He did not know, after all, what date in 1897 or 1898 she was supposed to have returned from her visit to Vienna. Perhaps Wheeler had indeed inadvertently become the catalyst for getting Weezie back to Boston, where she was supposed to be. He had no reason to believe that he had altered anything that was going to happen anyway or caused to happen anything that would not have. And yet irrationally, as he sat alone in the Café Central this morning, he felt total and irreparable despair. Now, with Weezie gone, with Dilly’s secrets revealed, he thought back on something Dilly observed in one of their first conversations. “We know how all of this turned out,” he had said, perplexed by the confusions of living life backward. “It’s pretty confusing, but anything we do here must conform to the causes and effects that have already happened in our own pasts.”
From the beginning of their time together in Vienna, he and Dilly had discussed the effects their presence would have on the future. Dilly had put forward Einstein’s theory that each moment of a time traveler’s presence in the past would create a separate reality and spin these separate realities off into an infinite array into the future. Or, they considered, perhaps nothing would change, that the future would unfold exactly as it was meant to, no matter what they did with their time. Whatever it was, Dilly had concluded that their role was to stay out of the way, to have as little impact as possible.
“You’re at your station early this morning,” he heard and looked up from his deep contemplations to find the youthful smiling face of Egon Wickstein.
“I like my inspirations early,” Wheeler said. “Usually I take a morning walk.”
“With a young lady, I have noticed.”
“No longer,” Wheeler said, trying to mask his great disappointment. “She returned home.”
“So that is why you look so forlorn.”
“We all recover from such affairs of the heart, don’t we?”
“Ah, you are philosophical,” he said. “That is good. I like philosophers. ” Wheeler suppressed a laugh. Egon Wickstein at nineteen would have had no appreciation of how a visitor from the late twentieth century might look with amusement at the remark.
“What brings you out so early?” Wheeler asked.
“I’m looking for inspiration.” The young philosopher held up a pile of loose sheets of paper. “A
Neue Freie Presse
deadline. The editor is impressed by my work and says he will consider my
feuilleton,
if I submit it this afternoon. I am full of hope, but devoid of ideas.”
“What have you so far?”
“Chaotic thoughts. I am arguing the twelfth century was the pinnacle of civilization.”
“Interesting,” Wheeler said. “Let me hear more.” And the young man handed him the small pile, which he read through quickly. “These are good,” he said. “They just need a little library paste to bind them together.” The remark was straight from the Haze.
Wheeler motioned for the young student to sit down beside him as Wheeler wrote in his journal. “How is this?” the young man said after scribbling for a while.
“Much better,” Wheeler said, amused. “Except I would move this to here—” He pointed to one paragraph and found a spot on another page. “And change this around to come after the list.” He was sounding like the Haze, the drill sergeant of
feuilleton
style, barking out orders to the recruits. Then he thought. “And the list—have you thought of these reasons? ” He wrote down three items in the margin of one of the sheets. Wickstein looked at them and smiled. “They’re beautiful,” he said, looking admiringly at Wheeler. “May I use them?”
“Of course,” Wheeler said. “Why not?”
“They are your thoughts. If the
feuilleton
is published people will credit me for the insights, when they are in fact yours.”
Wheeler smiled at the young student. “You can say you stood on the shoulders of giants.”
Wickstein recognized the quote. He raised his index finger and waited for a thought. “Sir Isaac Newton,” he said.
“Precisely,” said Wheeler and watched Wickstein scribbling out the final draft of his
feuilleton.
As he finished, he held it up to read.
“Listen to this,” he extracted from Wheeler’s scribbled notes. “ ‘The Preconditions of Cultural Apex.’ ” Then he paused. “It isn’t too pretentious? ”
Wheeler, too deep in mournful thoughts of his lost Emily James to notice what just transpired, smiled absently. Why had she affected him so deeply and her leaving torn at his heart so devastatingly? Her very presence had changed him, him the compulsive conversationalist. With her he did not need to speak, only observe and watch her develop. With her he felt, maybe for the first time, a total sense of belonging and acceptance. With her he felt total and passionate and peaceful love. How was that possible? How did it work? “That will be just fine,” he said absently to the departing philosophy student.
After Wickstein had rushed off to finish his last revisions and take his essay to the
Neue Freie Presse
office, Wheeler remained by himself, writing, lost in reverie. At one point, in the middle of a thought, he looked up, out toward the doorway to the street. A vision in a white high-necked dress slid into his field of view and glided toward him, past the sparsely peopled tables. Her smile was beatific, Botticelli-like, as she approached, first as an apparition, then as reality.
“Oh, I so desperately hoped to find you here,” she said, looking both distraught and relieved. “I was so afraid you would be gone.” Wheeler was looking into the beautiful, expectant face of Weezie Putnam.
37
The Child in Lambach
I got as far as Nuremberg,” she said, looking into the blank stare that expressed at least part of the turmoil in Wheeler’s mind. Her cheeks had a rosy glow and her eyes shone. “So much for my famous decisiveness.” She looked around at the scattered patrons of the café. “Do you think we could walk?”
Her hand was again gently on his arm as they walked along the Ringstrasse, from the Burgring to the Franzensring. “I feel so ashamed of myself, ” she said for the third time, the words now bursting from her. “I have been overcome by a dichotomy of feeling, one telling me that I have done something unpardonable and need to flee, the other saying that I have just begun to open like a flower. I have chosen to honor the second.” She paused as they walked, and Wheeler said nothing. “The more I thought and worried,” she continued, “and the more I felt terrible and wretched, the more you were central in all my thoughts. The reason I came back—” She pulled him to a stop and looked up into his eyes. Everything came out in a rush. “I have never known anyone who was as kind and sensitive and who had deeper and kinder insights or deeper and kinder feelings for me. I return to you and face the fears and erase the shame once and for all. I come back to something I cannot describe, something distractingly and debilitating and passionate. And so I found another train from Nuremburg, a desperately slow train, I might add. After what I have done I would not be surprised if you would want no more to do with me.” She stopped for breath.