The Lost Prince (29 page)

Even years later it was clear that Arnauld never fully understood what happened, but somehow the older American was struck down mysteriously, in the very presence of Weezie Putnam, Kleist told him. And since no witnesses could identify the perpetrator, no one ever knew exactly what had transpired, or why. It was rumored that Sigmund Freud had witnessed the awful event, but Arnauld had never been able to confirm that detail, and Dr. Freud never came forward.

“There remain a number of peculiar details,” Kleist told him grimly after it was all over. “No one has been able to determine just who the older American fellow Mr. Truman was or what he was doing in Vienna. Some in our café crowd suspect that his name was not Truman at all, and that he was some sort of secret agent.”

However it was, the events had had a devastating effect on Miss Putnam, who remained secluded in her room at her boardinghouse where she had lived her entire time in Vienna, the owner, Fräulein Tatlock, being, by complete coincidence, an old friend of Arnauld’s family. Encouraged by Alma, Arnauld actually paid a call on her there, not really knowing what else to do.

She seemed enormously relieved to see him. “I am being required to stay here for a time by the police,” she said, obviously distraught. “Until this highly regrettable situation is cleared up.” Her face was pale and drawn, her hair mussed; there were dark shadows under her eyes, and there was little of her former radiance, a plight that if anything only endeared her to him all the more.

“If there is anything I can do…?” he began with an obvious helplessness.

“Oh, Arnauld,” she said, “I am greatly appreciative just knowing you are nearby. I have received a shock, but I will survive, and I do want you to remain my dear friend.” And then she added with what seemed a sudden spontaneity, “And perhaps even come to Boston at some point.”

He would follow her anywhere, he wished to say, but of course he did not. “I would consider that an honor,” was all he could think of saying. “At some point.”

“But right now I need to recover some modicum of equilibrium,” she said. “I hope you understand.” He left her alone then, but before they parted, she took his hand and pressed it with a surprising vitality. “What I have proposed is of utmost importance to me, and I wish most vehemently to engage you in correspondence. I shall be writing you.”

He visited her each morning at Fräulein Tatlock’s pension, until the day of her departure. He would sit with her quietly in the parlor, sometimes saying nothing, watching her busy herself with the writing project she seemed now intent on completing. “You are my historical source,” she would say to him, referring to what she was writing, and then she would continue asking her endless questions. “It is all written here.” She was writing her reminiscence of her time in Vienna, it seemed, and although she shared none of its contents with him then, he could see that she was writing with considerable passion. “I wish to get the facts right. When I am finished,” she said once with a compelling smile, “the world will not know if this is my work or yours.”

“You exaggerate,” Arnauld said, “but I do appreciate being of use.”

“Dear Arnauld,” she said then, putting down her pen and looking deep into his eyes, a gesture he would remember and hold dear always, “you are indispensable to me, and I do not want to lose you.”

Then one morning she announced boldly, “I am being allowed to leave, and I shall be traveling home with this at least.” She held up a stack of handwritten pages.

“Your reflections on your time here?” he said.

“At least a start,” she said. “I learned much about Vienna and culture from him.” She stopped, about to be overcome. “And from your history lessons,” she said quickly, pulling herself back.

“You have learned much from your American friend, I think.”

“Oh my, yes,” she said. “There is much from both of you in these pages. I hope to finish on shipboard.”

“The writing has been a good curative, I hope.”

“At least a start,” she repeated. Already she looked better.

Years later Arnauld remembered and held most dear the intensity with which she spoke those last words and the emptiness he felt the following
weeks as he walked past places in his dear city where they had met on so many occasions, an indescribable emptiness, he recalled, emptiness and hopelessness that stayed with him for many days. And then her first letter arrived.

As depleted as he felt by the tragedy that had befallen her—most of which he could only guess at—he was just beginning, in spite of his despair at her leaving, to understand that this woman, this Weezie Putnam from Boston, was to be the permanent love of his life. Like some chivalrous knight of old or a romantic poet of the last century, he was ready to devote himself to the adoration of this lady. The letters, of course, encouraged that.

After the events of Weezie Putnam’s time in Vienna, Arnauld found himself a changed man, filled with a romantic vision of his own future and a purpose he could not really define. Somehow throwing himself into study seemed to be the outcome. He was always considered a serious student, but now he pursued scholarship with an energy and a passion that earned him quite a reputation within the university and among the crowd that gathered at the Café Central. However it was, being a serious scholar and being perceived as such stuck with him. The role lasted the better part of a decade, as he pursued first his undergraduate work, the commission in the imperial army required by family tradition, and then the elevation to graduate status. He was on the way to becoming a full-fledged professor of history, “a distinguished one,” his professors told him on at least one occasion.

When military duty interrupted his academic career, as he accepted the obligation of the family name, his friends were more amused than surprised. “Arnauld is not exactly the military type,” one friend said. “Perhaps he will have more effect on them than they on him.” He was an Esterhazy after all, no matter how many generations of low birth order had separated him from any real significance, and Esterhazys were trained as officers in the emperor’s army. His own obligation upon receiving his commission was two years of active service as an officer. First, he served as a candidate, then as a lieutenant at an outpost in Galicia, with a colorful regimental uniform to show for it. After the initial service, he was then given the freedom to leave, which no one seemed to object to in a family
appointment such as his, and resume his university life with the respectable title “reserve” attached to his name. Throughout it all, he retained the right to wear the uniform to formal occasions such as operas and balls, should he wish, though he never did.

“You really ought to wear your uniform,” the disappointed Alma told him. “You look princely and dashing in it.”

“I do not wish to look princely and dashing,” Arnauld replied.

“But you could win your way into the hearts and beds of beautiful women,” Alma said. “That is a fine old Viennese tradition.”

“But I do not wish to win my way into the hearts and beds of beautiful women,” Arnauld said.

“For shame,” she said with feigned disapproval. “You would enjoy it, as would the beautiful women.”

Arnauld looked into his friend’s eyes and smiled. “Yours is the only heart I wish to win,” he said. “And yours is already taken, many times over.”

Alma reached out and touched his cheek affectionately, then released a resigned sigh. “Oh, Arnauld, I know where your heart is. It was taken from you, I fear, that day I introduced you to Miss Putnam in the Hofburg park.”

Arnauld said nothing but returned to his old friend a look of contented resignation.

“I will still not stop looking out for you,” she said, and he smiled again.

During those student days, he kept up his correspondence with Miss Putnam, who had returned to Boston and assumed her given name, Eleanor, and then in 1902 the formal married name of Mrs. Frank Burden. Her letters were always chatty and informative and affectionate, and she never seemed to be holding anything back, although most of the references concerned her social life in the beginning and then in 1904, the details of young motherhood. Whatever it was, he had the impression that she was sharing with him in the most warmly candid manner the intimate details of her life, and he responded by sharing the same of his.

From the start, Arnauld was aware of her close relationship with William James, and, of course, he had read the great man’s major works both in English and in German translation. From time to time he would write
with questions about the eminent Dr. James, and she would always answer, “Of course, I could not speak for him, but…,” and then follow with a very concise and probably very accurate summary of Dr. James’s view of one subject or another. Over the years, through her letters and her many references to Dr. James’s thoughts and ideas and their times together, Arnauld had come to believe that Eleanor was one of the great philosopher’s best-informed interpreters, without knowing or acknowledging the role.

The suggestions that Arnauld come to Boston to teach did not begin until nearly ten years after their fateful meeting in Vienna, as Arnauld was finishing his studies and scholarly apprenticeship at the university and beginning to wonder aloud what to do with his life. The future as a stuffy old university professor seemed to him a bit deflating, but his own reserved nature, he feared, was keeping him where he was. In one letter he actually said, “My life is so awfully staid. I would love to see myself as someone who would do something unpredictable.” The unpredictable, she began writing him, ought to be to come to Boston “for a few years,” and accept a teaching position at her husband’s former school, St. Gregory’s.

In 1907, when his childhood friend Alma Schindler, now married to Gustav Mahler, the renowned director of the Vienna opera, moved with her husband to New York City, Arnauld listened to her descriptions of America and was enticed, as if the insistent invitations from his beloved Eleanor were not enough. So at the end of 1909, he abandoned all caution and said yes to an offer from St. Gregory’s School. In August 1910, he moved to Boston and took up a position teaching geography to the younger boys, a position that was designed to grow in stature, moving up to the older boys, “when he gained his sea legs,” as the headmaster said.

Arnauld Esterhazy’s adjustment to Boston and St. Gregory’s was fueled first by his fascination with the early history of the American republic. He had never been to America, and he found his initial impression, despite the obvious challenges of being in a new land, to be exhilarating. All his life he had loved traveling to new cities, and in his twenties he assigned himself to the grand tour that seemed de rigueur for young men of university age. “See how the rest of the world works,” one of his language professors had said to him. From early years he loved the feeling of abstraction that one received in someone else’s culture, how what seemed ordinary and everyday to the denizens seemed magical to visitors. And so, like so many of Europe’s upper-class young gentlemen,
he had traveled to all the cities of the empire and the cities of Europe and even to India and Africa. But he had never been to America.

In preparing for his new assignment, teaching geography to young boys, he committed to learning their country’s history along with them. And from the start, what he found fascinating was that whereas the culture he had grown up in, beneficiary now of a parliamentary monarchy, stretched back over centuries of aristocracy and ruling families, a vast and varied collection of countries knitted together by loyalty to an emperor, America grew up over a much shorter time from a group of cities and states united by a continent rich in undeveloped resources and dedicated to democratic rule. By entering in Boston, he was acquainting himself with the very site of the country’s birth, a thought that enthralled. Upon his arrival in the strange new city, he walked through the historic neighborhoods, visiting sites of the great American Revolution, and he began to familiarize himself with such places as Faneuil Hall, Bunker Hill, and the Old North Church, from whose steeple Paul Revere received his lanterned message that the British troops were coming. He relished in absorbing the names and events that formed the revolution from British rule and the origins of the democratic republic that served as a model for the world.