The Little Book (10 page)

Prentice Olcott’s roommate, also a first classman, was the second line pitcher. And he did well for five innings or so, escaping with his scalp in the fifth, with St. Greg’s still ahead, four to nothing. Then in the sixth he lost all semblance of control, walking the first two batters and delivering a home run ball to the third. So, with his pitcher shot, no outs, two innings from the finish line and a meager one-run lead, Coach Storer looked down his bench at his depleted pitching staff. The old grads held their breath, knowing not to intrude, but hoping against hope. There was simply no fresh arm to put in. A palpable hush fell over the St. Gregory’s diamond. “Burden,” Coach Storer said in little more than a whisper, and three generations of St. Greg’s boys released a corporate sigh of joy and relief, not caring—at least for a moment—that the kid from California was no chip off the heroic block. Winning be damned, the son of Dilly Burden would pitch against Dover.

If Wheeler knew anything of the enormity that rode on Coach Storer’s desperate decision, he showed nothing. He jumped up off the end of the bench and picked up his father’s thirty-year-old glove, giving it a few hurried slaps with his fist. “Get us out of this damn mess” was Coach Storer’s gravelly whisper to the untested second-teamer, his voice betraying suspicions of utter hopelessness. At least the boy could throw strikes, some of the time. “Focus, son,” the old coach said.

Wheeler had made virtually no impression on the athletic program at his new school. He cared little for any sport but baseball, and he had not thrown the prongball since arriving. It was not that he had been unimpressed with the school and that he did not think them worthy of seeing it; it was just that as second-team pitcher he had never really thrown the ball very hard at all, coming up against few boys who could hit even his slow pitches, and it did not seem fair to the younger boys to throw anything they couldn’t hit.

“How about strikeouts?” Wheeler said with a characteristic wildness in his eyes, popping his fist into his antique glove.

“Steady, lad,” Coach Storer said without much enthusiasm. “Nothing fancy. Just get the thing over the plate.” A few miraculous catches deep in the outfield, he was thinking, and we’ll be out of this.

Wheeler was not sure if the umpire would watch the ball. Sacramento Valley teams had pretty much gotten wind of his doctorings and asked for new balls regularly. It was always disappointing to start on a new ball, especially with all eyes on his between-pitches moves. Of course, he could throw the pitch middling well, as Bucky said, without the goop on it, but it never felt as satisfying as with a ball he had had a chance to personalize. Wheeler had learned to wet his finger immediately
after
the pitch, when the whole world was watching the batter, not before, when all eyes were on the pitcher’s mound.

Trip Thornton, the catcher, knew nothing of the prongball and gave Wheeler a queer look when he tried to warn him. “Ball’s going to jump around a little,” Wheeler said in a businesslike voice no one at St. Greg’s had ever heard.

“You worry about pitching,” Thornton said curtly, intending to put the upstart in his place. “I’ll worry about catching.” Thornton, a nine-letter man himself, but somewhat in the shadow of Prentice Olcott, knew only that—Dilly Burden’s son or not—no one liked the brash Californian who certainly did not know his place. Thornton could not help wondering why Coach Storer had taken leave of his senses at such an important moment in St. Greg’s history, with Dover men hitting the balls all over the place. But then again, who else was there?

“Just put it over the plate,” Thornton, the catcher, growled, looking forlornly over to the bench as he slapped the ball into Wheeler’s glove and walked back to his crouch behind home plate.

Wheeler blinked lizardlike at Thornton, as if to confirm his hopeless weirdness. During warm-ups he had laid some good wet ones on his finger and transferred them to the spot between the label and the stitching till it was slick, just the way he wanted it. The practice pitches snapped into Thornton’s glove, giving little warning of what was about to follow.

Before the first pitch to a Dover batter, the first Burden varsity pitch at St. Greg’s in twenty-five years, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He let his mind go, as he had done many, many times before. Back in the Feather River bottomland with his mother. He felt the smooth stone in his hand. He thought of his arm throwing the stone in the direction of the sparrow hawk. He felt the connectedness. He then opened his eyes and stared at Thornton’s glove, pronging his fingers just so between the label and the stitch. He paused to hear Bucky Hannigan’s litany: “How to chuck, wheeler-dealer. How to chuck-fire, wheeler-dealer kid.”

The crowd seemed to wait through this ritual with a heavy expectant silence. Then slowly he raised his left leg, rocked backward with his upper body, swung forward, brought his arm over his head in a looping arch, and came down with everything he had. As his wrist snapped downward, the ball squirted out from between his fingers and sped toward Thornton’s glove, right to the center of the strike zone. The batter, the Dover short-stop, a feisty little scholarship boy, a grocer’s son from Swampscott, took a mighty rip. The ball, heading straight, took a two-foot drop about five feet from the plate and flew past the batter and Trip Thornton and clanked against the baseboard of the backstop. In one motion, the umpire, the catcher, and the grocer’s son from Swampscott swung around and stared at the pitcher’s mound where Wheeler was standing slapping his famous father’s ancient glove. “Holy shit,” the Dover kid said, shaking his head, looking back at Trip Thornton. “What in Jesus’s name was that?”

The first classman catcher only stared back and said, “Beats hell out of me.”

Whatever it was, it came back again and then again, both for strikes and then for two more batters. In Wheeler Burden’s part of that next-to-last inning the Dover boys went three up and three down, leaving the bases empty and St. Greg’s up by one run.

The baselines were now packed with teachers, students, and alumni. Almost as soon as Coach Storer had contemplated the pitching change, word had spread around the campus: Get over to the varsity diamond. Dilly Burden’s boy is going in.

All eyes watched in awed silence as Wheeler slapped his fist into his glove one last time and headed back to the bench. The gravelly voice of an old grad came from over by third base. “Burden, rah—” it began, the way it had so many times before, a quarter of a century ago. “Burden, rah—” came the sound again, this time picking up ten or more other old voices. Then the pause, an entire school community searching into its mythic past, everyone—even those not born then—recalling memories of the great Dilly Burden, the school’s one true and enduring hero. One voice rose this time, one voice from the throats of every St. Greg’s boy past, present, and future. “Burden, rah,” it boomed. “Burden, rah. Burden, rah, rah.”

The seventh and last inning went quickly. There was no need to add anything to the ball. It was exactly the way Wheeler liked it. The prongball dipped and hopped and danced. Two Dover batsmen came up, took their swings, and went down. One, two—The third batter fared no better on the first two pitches, chasing two low outsiders. Strike two.

The last pitch. Wheeler thought of his Feather River bottomland walks with his mother. He saw the sparrow hawk, he felt the stone in his hand, he looked in at Thornton’s target, and heard the “How to chuck-fire wheeler-dealer kid!” from his one true friend in the world. He thought of Buddy Holly, lost in the chords and the rhythm and the skip of the Tex-Mex voice he had first heard mimicked in the old Feather River Union High gym. For the first time since coming east, he was beginning to feel the “flow,” as his mother called it, the connectedness of all things.

The crowd took a corporate breath, and Wheeler gripped the ball between the two fingers of his right hand, kicked up his left leg, brought it down, and fired. The ball did not dip or sink. It flew straight and true and snapped into Thornton’s glove, past the last violent and hapless swing of the last Dover batter. It was a pure straight fastball, maybe the fastest, straightest, purest pitch anyone there that day had ever seen. “Steee-rike!” yelled the umpire. Strike three. The day was St. Gregory’s.

The crowd exploded from the sidelines out to the raised pitcher’s mound, where Wheeler’s grandfather, Frank Burden, and his father, Dilly, had stood, and Wheeler slapped his fist one last time into his thirty-year -old glove. They hoisted Wheeler onto their shoulders.

From his perch atop the swarm Wheeler looked back at the emptied bench. Only Prentice Olcott, the disabled captain, stared out at him with a mixture of joy and outrage. Wheeler blinked at him, his best lizard look, then he looked into the emptied stands. There stood the solitary remaining spectator, the Venerable Haze. Wheeler realized something in that moment, and he carried it with him for the next twenty-five years, for the rest of his life. It was love the old man held for his father, Dilly Burden, a love based on something more than his athletic heroics or his near-mythic turn as the Resistance hero Rouge Gorge. The Haze was now seeing two Burdens out on the St. Greg’s mound, hoisted on the shoulders of the Dover game crowd, son and father, 1958 and 1932. Wheeler understood that in the tumultuous moment. Steadying himself on his rough ride, he looked the old man square in the eye and touched the bill of his cap, as if to doff it. It was then Wheeler noticed the tears soaking the old man’s cheeks.

10

City of Music

Wheeler found himself wandering out on the Ringstrasse. Still shocked by the discovery earlier in the day that the Viennese in the park was his mentor, Arnauld Esterhazy, he needed time to sort things all out. He kept his appointment at the cabinetmaker’s shop and viewed the near-finished version of the wooden Frisbee, making a few last corrections, then found his way back onto the boulevard. When he came to the Imperial Art History Museum he walked up the steps, paid his fifty kreuzer admission fee and began wandering through the high-ceilinged rooms, all the time preoccupied by the strangeness of his predicament. He was standing in front of a collection of sixteenth-century paintings, lost in a flood of thoughts, when a voice came from behind him.

“You have an interest in the finer arts, I see, Mr. Truman.” He turned and looked into the bright smiling face of the captivating young American woman, Emily James. He pulled himself back from his reverie.

“Miss James, isn’t it?” he said. “From Amherst, Massachusetts.”

She looked pleased that he had remembered her name, and nodded. “You are good with names, I see,” she said. “And places.”

How could I not remember
? he felt like saying. “I love the quiet of museums, ” he said. “They quiet the restless soul.” He was quoting one of the Haze’s favorite remarks.

“
Quiet the restless soul
,” she repeated with a smile. “That is Byron, I believe.”

“Actually, I was quoting a beloved old mentor,” Wheeler said, still not fully recovered from the surprise of running into her. He had nearly forgotten how disarming he found this young woman’s manner of looking one straight in the eye, the way her blue eyes gained intensity as she spoke to him, and the flush that came to her cheeks. “But I don’t know where he got it,” he said, musing on the words. He paused. “I thought you were on your way to Schonbrunn Palace with your friends.”

“Group indecision,” she said quickly. “It was a short trip. We turned around almost as soon as we got there. And I decided to come here by myself, to have time for contemplation.”

“I am sorry to disturb that.”

“Oh no, Mr. Truman,” she said enthusiastically. “It was I who broke into
your
contemplation.” Wheeler noted that she was blushing.

“I am glad for it,” he said. “Either way. Is this your first time in this museum?”

“I have come here a lot, alone,” she said. “I too find museums very restful and a chance to collect myself. This one is very good. It was the emperors’ and made public only in the middle of this century.” She looked at the collection of watercolors in front of Wheeler. “I find these exquisite,” she said. “They were a gift for the collection of watercolors and drawings by Austrian artists given to Rudolf and his bride, the Princess Stephanie, on their marriage sixteen years ago. You see the two of them pictured there—” She pointed. “And there.” She pointed to one entitled
Defregger
, a charmingly colorful work of Rudolf and Stephanie in a rustic cabin. “I find it absolutely exhilarating that the arts abound so in this country.”

“They really are quite exquisite,” Wheeler said, leaning down to examine the watercolors more closely.

“They are,” she said, seized by an involuntary frown. “But it reminds one of the awful tragedy of Mayerling. I suppose we will never know the full story.”

The Haze told all of his boys the facts of the Mayerling tragedy each year, on January 30, the day in 1889, that in the grand bedroom of the royal hunting lodge, in the village of Mayerling, Crown Prince Rudolf, only son and male heir of the emperor, the hope of the future, took his own life and the life of a seventeen-year-old courtesan. “Rudolf shot the light-headed baroness first,” Wheeler remembered his mentor intoning, “then he went downstairs for drink and companionship, then six or eight hours later returned to the upstairs room and shot himself in the head.”

“I suppose not, Miss James,” Wheeler said.

A look of great sadness came onto her face. “It was absolutely devastating for this lighthearted country. Just imagine the heir to the throne, the very future of the empire doing this—” She paused without being able to say the word. Then she shook her head. “I keep thinking of his mother, the great and beautiful empress. To lose a son this way—” She paused again, overcome by the gravity. “To lose a son any way at all. Simply awful.”

A silence fell between them. “I suppose that is the reason for museums, ” Wheeler said lightly, to change the mood. “They allow us to relive poignant moments.”