The Lost Prince (3 page)

Frank had actually asked for Eleanor’s hand before their time in Vienna, it was known, and although Eleanor had not responded then or immediately after their return, they both moved forward, it seemed, with certain assumptions, Eleanor leading the way. Over the weeks following their return, with no actual commitment yet, Eleanor made a number of requests that Frank Burden granted without hesitation.

“Frank, I would like to accompany you to Trinity,” she had said in the first weeks. “It would be good for both of us.” And he nodded agreement, knowing full well, as did she, what would be assumed by such a public change in their lives, her sitting at his side at Trinity Church on Sunday, up front in the Burden pew.

Eleanor and Frank both attended Trinity Church by family tradition going back generations, but arriving together and sitting side by side was as good as an announcement of their intentions. And Frank, who had recently been appointed to the finance committee of the vestry, a position formerly held by his father and before that his grandfather, agreed to join also the charity committee, a surprising addition to his involvement in the church, and the statement of his willingness to be part of the church’s activities in the poorer quarters of the city, a sign perhaps of the influence of the community-minded young woman he had begun sitting beside on Sundays.

Frank also agreed to take part with her in a number of other charitable activities, including those connected with the Boston hospitals. “We can always use a man of finance,” one committee member at the Boston Lying-In Hospital said to the staunch young banker, as he appeared at one of their meetings for the first time. Those who had known Frank Burden well would have noticed the change in attitude brought about by his open and willing association with Eleanor Putnam and might have concluded that he was, for some reason, doing penance.

Another change of habit at this time in his life was his accompanying
Eleanor to lectures at various museums and even an alumnae event at her all-female Smith College. “Such visits to a women’s college will do a man good,” Eleanor said lightly, “in case he finds himself raising daughters.” And indeed after his daughters were born, he even made statements, admittedly mild ones, supporting women’s suffrage. And once, a few years later, Frank Burden would stop conversation at the annual Symphony Ball by announcing loudly, “By the time my daughters reach adulthood, they will be voting.”

Of any dark part of their history together there was simply no mention. Eleanor had chosen to move ahead with her steely resolve, and Frank went about his business with characteristic rectitude, establishing himself in the banking world, especially in areas of international finance, as a young man of promise. Of course there was never any mention of why it would be unwise for him to set foot on the Continent or to go anywhere near Austria or Germany or, more specifically, Vienna. He made it clear to anyone who asked that, for the time being, he would not be returning to Europe. No one at his bank noticed any sudden discomfort and reluctance when associates brought up the subject of European travel, an area in which he had in the past shown great enthusiasm and had in that same past established considerable expertise. He simply made it clear that travel would be the province of others at the bank and that he was going to stay home and mind affairs in Boston for a while. Eleanor was helpful in this regard.

“It is really quite simple,” she was heard to say. “Frank and I have declared a five-year moratorium on personal travel,” she said. “It is very natural. There is so much to concentrate on at home.”

But then, of course, no one knew the full story of their relationship, nor would anyone ever, save two people. In Eleanor’s extraordinary destiny, marriage to Frank Burden was just what had to happen.

From the moment of her return, she shared this part of her life, concerning Frank Burden, with her godfather, William James. During her childhood time at Winsor School in Boston or at Smith College or now upon her return from abroad, William James always made it clear that he enjoyed her discourses on her various adventures. Now, more than ever, she enjoyed sharing with her wise godfather her goals and ambitions for her life in Boston. “You seem to have found with Frank a mature compatibility that serves both of you well,” Dr. James observed. “It is very satisfying to watch.”

“We are very different,” Eleanor said, “as if we are of different temperaments.”

“Different temperaments can make for good marriages,” he said.

“That will be so in our case,” she said, and Dr. James smiled knowingly and nodded.

“You, my dear, will make it so.” On many occasions the great professor had told her of the high regard he had for her powerful resolve. He who had known well Eleanor’s late parents observed often how the daughter had inherited the mother’s “strength of character,” as he called it.

Dr. James had also known Frank Burden in his recent athletic days at Harvard and had been impressed by how Frank and a group of American college students had traveled to Athens and participated very successfully in the first modern Olympic Games, a few years before in 1896. “Frank is very steadfast,” Dr. James said.

Oblivious to most of the way he was being perceived, Frank, having recovered from whatever it was that had subdued him upon his return from Vienna, went about his life with that characteristic steadfastness and began gradually regaining all of his former energy and vigor. The eventual announcement of his forthcoming marriage, by the time of its arrival a surprise to no one, was greeted with universal approval throughout Boston. Those close to him had observed that he had gotten through a mysterious rough patch, a very uncharacteristic period of uncertainty and doubt of unknown origin. And Eleanor, ever silently at his side when he appeared in public, had received much credit, although not as much as she secretly deserved. “It is estimable,” a colleague at the bank said years later, “what the support of a good woman can do for a man.”

Frank and Eleanor emerged in the new century as leaders in many areas of Boston society, especially those having to do with service to the arts and to the city’s needy. In short, Eleanor Putnam was seen as a very positive addition in the life of promising young banker Frank Burden, providing what he needed to ensure that things in his world progressed exactly how he wanted.

And she asked him, in those days directly after her Vienna sojourn, as she called it, to handle her family investments and inheritance at the time of her father’s death. She found herself now with responsibility for a small endowment in stocks and bonds along with the house at 6 Acorn Street, the house where she had grown up, and Frank agreed to oversee it all.
“Women do not need to worry about finances,” he said to her. “That is what a good marriage is for.” He knew nothing then or later of the inner workings of the Hyperion Fund, which Eleanor knew she was intended to handle entirely on her own, independent of her husband.

And so, in a few short years following their return from Vienna, Frank and Eleanor established an equilibrium as one of the highly respected marriages in Boston, well documented in the social columns of the Boston newspapers and well received in the discussions of the professionally successful and the well-to-do when they discussed such things. Few, if any, knew the degree to which both Frank and Eleanor needed time to recover from what had transpired in Vienna and how after a few years they had successfully done so.

Overtly, one fact was clear to all: Frank Burden was now totally devoted to his wife and dependent on her for the strong family and social life he had around him, exactly how he thought things should be, “now and forever in Boston,” as he liked to say. Years later, in summing up Frank Burden’s life, a close friend would observe, “In Eleanor Putnam, Frank was getting exactly what he wanted. She ran a beautifully organized home, arranged the family’s social schedule, saw to all the necessary involvement in the cultural life of the city, presented him with three gifted and successful children, allowing Frank to worry about little more than his very active and demanding life at the bank. Who would not have envied him that?”

This stability at home allowed Frank to become “one of the most prominent bankers in this city that prides itself in great banking,” the friend said. “None in Boston could imagine a better life partner for Frank Burden than Eleanor Putnam, or a better financial advisor than young Frank himself.”

Frank eventually proposed again, and this time Eleanor accepted, and their plans of marriage had gone exceedingly well, initiated primarily by him it appeared, and had resulted in a wedding date in the fall of 1902. “We shall need to wait for the Jameses to return from England,” she said. William James and his wife, Alice, were in England with his brother Henry for over a year during that lengthy courting time, and it was he who would be giving her away. And, not coincidentally, the necessary postponement of the wedding date, waiting for the Jameses to return, would allow her time to pursue the next rather arduous assignment from her Vienna commitment, which she kept in deepest secrecy.

That assignment was the purchase of stock in a company called Cincinnati Soap and Candle Company, one she knew in name only from a single line in the Vienna journal and one, she deduced from that simple reference, in which she was intended to invest the entirety of her newfound fund. This was to be her first foray into the stock market, the specific ins and outs of which she knew virtually nothing about. But who better to advise her than the staunch young banker she was about to marry, Frank Burden, provided that she could keep the very core of it secret? Being very careful not to divulge too much, and certainly not to mention anything having to do with Vienna, she sought his advice on how to begin a conversation with a prospective company.

“All businesses want investors,” Frank said very precisely, as if talking to a child, “and of course some more than others, at certain times more than others. The challenge is to choose wisely and not to allow the needs of the company to sway one’s decision. A woman should not be making decisions on such matters, of course. You will soon have a husband to handle such affairs for you, should they arise.” He smiled and changed the subject to one he thought more appropriate. “That is what we are for,” Frank concluded, a theme she had heard from him many times before.

In this and her other conversations with her fiancé, she took what tiny nuggets of advice and perspective she found and disregarded the rest, always concluding with something genuinely gracious. “Oh, thank you, Frank,” she said this time. “You are very kind.”

Steadfast Frank Burden never, then or later, suspected in such remarks even the slightest bit of irony.

OUT WEST

I
n the time before Eleanor’s marriage to Frank Burden, Arnauld Esterhazy was still a university student in Vienna, and although she had begun a correspondence with him, she had not yet even begun the difficult task of talking this talented young intellectual into leaving the comfort and stimulation of his dear city and coming to Boston to pursue an academic life at a boys’ school.

Not wishing to overpower her young friend and yet wishing to attract his interest, Eleanor decided to write him in return each time she received from him a letter, thereby allowing him to set the pace, as it were. Because a letter took almost two weeks to travel from Vienna to Boston, the frequency of their correspondence added up to a letter every month or so. Having no family life to report on, Eleanor decided to describe for young Arnauld the historic and cultural life of Boston. Drawing parallels where she could with the life she knew of his Vienna, the strategy accomplished her two goals: first of sharing her life, if only in this general way, and second in making Boston life sound so compelling that he might wish to participate in it, when the time came. And we do know from the existing correspondence that she sent her young friend a copy of
City of Music
shortly after its publication.

It seemed to Eleanor that the young friend became more and more comfortable sharing his inner thoughts. After her death there was found in a trunk a collection of letters and papers assembled with great care over a lifetime by someone wishing for the complete story to be known. Within
this considerable assemblage of correspondence is a packet of the letters between Eleanor and her young Viennese friend, the central documentation for this story. Only a few months into the exchange, we notice that young Arnauld Esterhazy ceased addressing her as “Miss Putnam.”