The Lost Prince (21 page)
Opportunity for further talk never arrived. William James died a few days after her departure, on August 26, 1910, in his beloved summer home in New Hampshire, his head resting in his wife’s arms. Afterward, the autopsy showed acute enlargement of the heart. It was noted later that the great philosopher had drawn from that weary heart, right up until the end, every ounce of available energy.
For the rest of her life it meant the world to Eleanor Burden that among his last words to his daughter had been “We shall meet again.”
ARNAULD ARRIVES
A
fter all her efforts getting Arnauld to think of coming to Boston, none of them easy—the steady use of letters, first making brief suggestions that he might consider short visits during his days as an undergraduate at the University of Vienna, then gradually becoming more and more specific—the feat was actually accomplished and Arnauld Esterhazy had actually accepted a position teaching young boys at St. Gregory’s. Eleanor found herself relieved beyond words and amazed. But like so many other details prescribed by her fate, she had worked hard and then found herself surprised by exactly the predicted outcome she had been working toward all along.
The connection with Will Honeycutt at Harvard and Cambridge had become a vitally important element. She had thought the strategy up as a way of giving Arnauld the possibility of an intellectual life to compensate for the one he had given up in Vienna. The promise of invitation to Boston homes, she concluded, might help him see perhaps that life in Boston could be a reality he would greatly enjoy. And, of course, the frequent visits to her own home would be the icing on the cake. She knew that her grand scheme to bring him to Boston was a great intrusion into his life in Vienna, but she knew also that his arrival was a necessary step in the destiny that was to be for him in the end a great fulfillment: his becoming the great and legendary teacher of young men that he was meant to be.
Finally, one late summer afternoon, as she stood on the platform at Back Bay Station and waited for the afternoon train from New York—Will Honeycutt had traveled to Hoboken to meet Arnauld’s steamer—she
realized that the whole plan really might work out as intended. Then there he was, standing beside his new American friend Will Honeycutt, smiling broadly, and happy to be in what he called “this brave new world.”
“I do so appreciate the work you have done to bring about this happy occurrence in my life,” the shy Arnauld said a little stiffly in greeting her and accepting her kiss on each cheek.
“And I hope that it lives up to your greatest expectation,” Eleanor said. “This is a happy day for me. That is for sure.”
“I hope to prove worthy,” he added.
“I think you will adapt quickly,” Eleanor told him.
“If eagerness plays a part, I shall,” Arnauld Esterhazy said, “as my eagerness to be here is without bounds. I feel, at least for the moment, as if destiny has called me here to Boston.”
“It is an eagerness that you will find reciprocal,” Eleanor said. “Here and elsewhere. Your arrival has been greatly anticipated.”
Arnauld did in fact adjust to it all well. He was a generous and entertaining guest in responding to all manner of invitation, always the center of much anticipation and attention, always a much-sought-after guest, “quite the rage,” a friend called him, “there is something in his shy manner that makes everyone want your cultured Viennese friend on her guest list.” Sometimes Frank and Eleanor Burden accompanied him on these social outings, and sometimes not. Arnauld, ever comfortable and gracious, didn’t seem to mind.
His adaptation to teacher of young boys at St. Gregory’s School was not quite as effortless, but in time even that went well. At first, the young teacher’s “European” demeanor was perceived as “an air of superiority,” as the headmaster reported, but soon the boys began to realize that his bottomless and boundless command of history and geography would serve them well. It was the younger boys, the fifth classmen, the thirteen-year-olds, who discovered it first in their geography class, and then the older boys in world history, the second classmen, always the harder to win over, came around. By winter term, Arnauld Esterhazy was a fixture, and no one could remember why they had not warmed up to him in the first place. Arnauld, for his part, seemed captivated by what he called “the American boy’s independence of spirit, like the country.” And, perhaps predictably, he fell in love with the peculiar sport of American football. “There are adults in Boston,” he told Eleanor, “who actually believe it of capital importance that St. Gregory’s defeat its rival in sport.”
And, of course, Eleanor, secret engineer of it all, found great relief in the degree to which Arnauld found amusement in the new life he was accommodating. It could so easily have turned the other way, she thought. But then she admitted that in her anxiousness about his adaptation she did not take enough into consideration her new guest’s unusual appreciation of newness and of life itself. “You are a wonder,” she said one chilly Saturday afternoon in November, as she stood beside him—he wearing the school colors in the wool scarf at his neck—at one of the older boys’ football games. “You have thrown yourself into the life of the school with admirable forbearance.”
“I forbear nothing,” he said with a broad smile. “I love the vitality of it all; in fact, I have found myself wishing that I had been an American schoolboy.”
In his moment of arrival in the new country, with all its stimulations and adjustments, Arnauld’s letters home to his mother and father began in earnest. It was because of these letters, Eleanor discovered later, that for his parents there was little question that Arnauld had taken to the surprising new teaching position in a foreign land with relish because of his continued attraction, to the point of adoration, to this woman they had never met, Eleanor Burden. There were in these letters home descriptions of the minutest detail of how he loved the thought of being in this Boston woman’s presence, of being invited to spend time in her home, of watching her two girls grow and flourish that would be, it was concluded later, worthy of a book.
My dear parents,
I have absolutely fallen in love with the American autumn. The contrast between the hot humid days of September and the crisp cold mornings of November is worthy of a poem by one of their poets—John Greenleaf Whittier or Walt Whitman, whom I have discovered—and of course the change in colors from the intense green to the famed oranges, reds, and yellows is the advertised spectacle. There is a quiet seriousness to the school day, which I quite enjoy, and a boisterous celebration of every weekend, much of it centered on one sporting event or another, usually their unique sport of football, in which the ball is passed from hand to hand and hurled through the air, so different from our game of feet. I joked when I first saw it that it ought to be called handball, but no one saw the humor in it.
I am being treated as something of a guest of state and have no
paucity of opportunity as a dinner guest and an occasional evening of music. All meals are provided by the school, if one wishes them, and some are part of my required duties, so that sometimes a quiet evening by myself is a relief. The advent of the American Thanksgiving is upon us with the promise of vacation on every boy’s mind and what I gather is to be a rich family gathering. The two Burden daughters, who are ages six and four, have prepared me by saying that it is “better than Christmas.” I will spend the entire time with the Burden family on Beacon Hill, and I must admit to a certain quivering of anticipation. Frank Burden has invited me to the annual football game between his Harvard and the rival Yale, and he has warned me that it is “quite a stirring event.” I will admit there also is a keen anticipation.
So you can see that my Americanization has gone well. One of my youngsters said to me the other day, “Mr. Esterhazy, you are never going to wish to leave.” Fear not that my conversion is that extreme, but I did have to admit to my students that I have found their way of life most compelling.
Yours ever,
Arnauld
As time passed and one year led to two, and two led to three and four, everywhere he went in Boston people of all ages loved his warm personality and cultured manner. Parents from the school would invite him for dinner, friends of Frank and Eleanor would invite him for weekends on Cape Cod or north to Gloucester and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He grew up to enjoy the life of a bachelor teacher at a fashionable boys’ school, and Eleanor smiled inwardly as she witnessed, sometimes from afar, sometimes up close, the success of her bold experiment.
Since the idea of his coming to Boston to teach at her husband’s alma mater was again completely at Eleanor’s instigation, a wild departure for an introspective Viennese intellectual, it was nevertheless one he claimed he wished to take on, for a short time at least, “to do something new and different.” That was the part he admitted, but also there was his adolescent dream of being close to the woman he adored, the part he kept entirely to himself, and the part Eleanor knew she would be exploiting to fulfill what she knew of destiny.
GRANDIOSE CONJECTURES
F
rom the beginning, long before she had any idea what it meant, she knew from a number of references in the journal she kept such a dark secret that a ship named the
Titanic
would sink on its maiden voyage in 1912, and that the famous J. P. Morgan would not be on board only because of a warning he was to receive from her. That one single journal prediction weighed as heavily on her as any.
Like so many details that would eventually appear on her path, she had to keep an eye out for mention of that fateful name
Titanic
. There was nothing. Then, in April 1908, a few years after her marriage, she noticed a small reference in the
Boston Globe
. White Star Line, the great English shipping company owned by Mr. Morgan, was planning the construction of three enormous luxury liners, the biggest ever built, each more than over eight hundred feet in length. They were to be built in a shipyard in Belfast, Ireland, named Harland and Wolff. The first two would be called the
Olympic
and the
Titanic,
both names fittingly derived from Greek mythology. She followed the construction as she could and learned just how the ships would be “unsinkable,” with separate sealable compartments within their massive hulls. She watched with the rest of the world as first the
Olympic
was launched in 1911, with its sister ship, the
Titanic
, soon to follow.
She could see in hindsight how the whole business had led to the unraveling of her partnership with Will Honeycutt, as had, again in hindsight, the events of 1907, four years previous.
She had brought the challenge of unsinkability to Will early on, back in 1910, when she first read of the two gigantic ships being constructed in Ireland. And her questions had lured him into the drama, she concluded later, although at the time she had thought the gesture on her part one caused by genuine curiosity rather than acquiring a partner in her new task of worrying about the ship.
“Unsinkable,” he said immediately and with authority upon hearing her question. “Unsinkable is unsinkable. It’s all in the design, the science,” he said, as he too had read of the forthcoming miracle ships, and in greater detail than she. “There are separate compartments within the hull, each controlled by automatic doors. Beautiful and expensive engineering.” But when she insisted on asking just how the “unsinkable” could sink, impossible as it was, he took the question on with surprising thoroughness, as a challenge, and said he would take some time with it. The next day, applying his tenacious energy for research to the task, Will Honeycutt made his report.
“Well, here is how it would be, as I see it, the highest improbability, mind you, but here it is. First, there is the steel—impregnable, they say. Then there are the watertight compartments. Struck from the side, even hit by a huge wave, the ship would remain upright and afloat. But let’s add a little imagination. If the ship steams across near-freezing water, which it will in the North Atlantic, we can assume, the hull is exposed to near thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit. At that unusual temperature some steels, depending on their components, become very brittle, as do the steel rivets that fasten them. If only one compartment is ruptured and floods, the ship remains upright and stable, but if a number of compartments flood—three or four, say—and the ship tilts…” He gestured by tilting one flattened hand. “Look at this. The compartments, secured as they are by automatic doors, are not sealed at the top. The water spills over the top of each bulkhead into the next compartment. The ship keeps tilting until all the compartments flood. The unsinkable sinks.” He paused to see that she understood, and Eleanor, hearing far more than she wished, grimaced her acknowledgment.
“In
Moby-Dick,
Ahab’s ship, the
Pequod
, is sunk by a great white whale, based on a real incident, I hear, the whaling ship the
Essex,
in 1820 or
something. The whale rams it with one giant head-on blow, breaks open a hole in the hull, and the ship sinks. For the
Titanic
that could not happen because of the compartments. Brilliant design, and they are thus saying, ‘Unsinkable.’”