The Lost Prince (31 page)

As he pulled his oars in and reached out with a hand to the dock, he looked up for the first time.

“I brought a surprise observer,” Will said. “She wanted to see how it is done, firsthand.”

Pulling himself back from wherever he had been, startled by the vision before him, the surprised rower gave his observer a tentative smile, as if uncomfortable with having been observed, and then his face broke into a huge grin. And then he blushed.

Suddenly there he stood beside her, nearly naked, looking so very much like a Roman marble that she found herself overcome in that moment in what her Smith College roommate would have called a state of “arousal,” unable to think clearly or to speak, even if the exhilarated rower had found the presence of mind in that moment to say something of substance, which he did not.

“I am honored that you came,” Arnauld said.

“That was beautiful, Arnauld,” she heard herself saying, and he looked up. “It is absolutely beautiful, Arnauld,” Eleanor repeated. “You have the grace of the gods out there.” Not accustomed to such flattery, from such a source, Arnauld only looked down.

Will helped him lift the shell out of the water and carry it toward the boathouse. “You can bring the oars,” he said to Eleanor. And she followed behind, carrying the oars into the boathouse, her face still flushed with wonder, still relishing the memory of what she had seen out on the water, now barely able to keep her eyes off the half-naked man only a few paces from her. It was a moment, she recalled later, when things changed, a moment that made enough of an impression on her at the time that she mentioned it in a letter to her friend Jung. “It is truly sublime,” she wrote. “I found myself transfixed. I don’t fully understand. It is as if this quiet, unassuming, and gentle man has transcended himself and made contact with some rich mythic past, a study in grace.”

Arnauld did not yet feel anything like grace at St. Gregory’s. The teaching did not come as naturally for him as the rowing suddenly did, especially not the teaching of American thirteen-year-old boys. “Teaching German to the older boys is more what I am accustomed to. I fear that I bore the younger ones,” he told Eleanor. “They are not as interested as I am.”

“They are more interested than you think,” Eleanor said with a reassuring smile. “I hear good reports.”

“But they are full of energy. In Vienna, we were taught to respect our teachers and to sit quietly and observe, on pain of corporal punishments.
We saved our rambunctiousness for outside of class. Here it seems to be quite the opposite. The boys are forever erupting in class, and outside they are quite sedate and respectful.”

“They respect you. I know that.”

“I think they wish to help me teach. Where I come from that would be preposterous.”

And not wishing to bore his students, he learned slowly how to modulate his passions. Arnauld Esterhazy and the St. Gregory’s boys took some time to get to know one another, it was said, but once they did it would be, as Will Honeycutt predicted, “smooth sailing.”

“Do not worry,” Eleanor said with a great and unusual confidence. “They will come around. You will become very successful. I know that in my bones.”

“You sound very certain,” Arnauld said.

“Oh, I am certain, Arnauld,” Eleanor said. “There is nothing about which I am more confident.” And that confidence from her did much to give Arnauld reassurance in moving forward.

Eleanor could not fully account for her feeling of confidence. Some of it came from what she knew of the future, her sense of destiny, but some of it came from the simple fact that she had loved being in Arnauld’s company from the beginning, even back in Vienna, when he was eighteen. It began as simple enjoyment and evolved over the years into something deeper. “He has knowledge,” William James had said to her upon hearing her descriptions of the young man from her past she was planning to bring to Boston. “Knowledge is great power, and greatly compelling.”

When William James was himself a young man, he had accompanied the famous professor Louis Agassiz to the Amazon. “Professor Agassiz knew the names of every species on earth, or so it seemed. Accompanying him into the wilds of the Amazon was a wondrous experience. ‘Knowledge is the greatest of aphrodisiacs,’ he used to say, ‘when applied discreetly.’”

Eleanor smiled and agreed and thought back on how much her young friend had grown on her during their time together in his Vienna, and how greatly she was looking forward to his arrival in Boston all these years later. “Arnauld’s applications are always discreet,” she said, reflecting on how even though getting Arnauld to come to Boston was her very demanding assignment, certainly not without anxious moments, the anticipation
of his arrival and its actually coming to pass now caused her heart to soar. “He is quite shy, actually, a very compelling quality.”

“It sounds as if you will enjoy very much his presence here,” William James observed on hearing of her plans to bring about his appointment at St. Gregory’s.

“You too will enjoy his company,” she said then to Dr. James. And later it always seemed sadly ironic that the great professor had died just as Arnauld was making his entry into Boston and St. Gregory’s. “He carries the history of European culture in his head,” Eleanor had said once to her great mentor.

Of course, William James knew the whole story eventually, but that was at the very end, when it became clear that he would not be able to meet this man who was to play such a very important role in her life. The great professor left, and the young teacher arrived. Grief that settled upon her at the one loss was ameliorated by the pleasure she took in watching her friend from the past adjust to his new role as visitor in a strange land.

During Arnauld’s frequent evenings at the Burden house on Acorn Street, Eleanor would grin inwardly with pleasure whenever she saw him in conversation with one of her friends. “His knowledge of things cultural is exquisite,” the rector of Trinity Church said to her one evening before the symphony. “He could do a whole treatise on the difference between Brahms and Haydn.”

“Or Poussin and David,” the wife of one of Frank’s partners, who was listening in, contributed.

“Or Flaubert and George Sand,” offered a third observer, the rector’s wife, a woman Eleanor had known since childhood. “And he does so with such eloquence, with that wonderful accent of his,” she added, with a smile of obvious relish. “And he carries himself with such a princely bearing.”

Such observations would always bring a proud smile to Eleanor’s lips, since Arnauld’s recruitment had been her idea, and hers alone. “Young Esterhazy is settling in. I think he just might be here for the long haul,” the headmaster said to her, then admitted to a feeling of great satisfaction in the success, as did everyone else at St. Gregory’s. “He is very amiable, you know,” the headmaster concluded. “Those of us in the school business are quite taken by amiability.” By Eleanor’s lights, everything had arrived at a very agreeable status.

But all of this was before her moment of “arousal” on the Harvard
College boathouse dock when she saw the near-naked elegance of the rowing for the first time, that moment that changed everything, especially considering what she knew was to come.

“And how are you enjoying your new life in Boston?” she asked Arnauld one evening soon after, before a gala for the Museum of Fine Arts, to which she had secured Arnauld an invitation.

“I am liking it very much,” Arnauld said, a little too quickly and glibly for Eleanor’s purposes.

She pressed him. “No, I mean really. I do wish to know.”

With this, Arnauld paused and gave the question consideration. “Really,” he said. “I find much to amuse myself, and I am adjusting to teaching. I find myself each evening wondering how I might present my lessons more effectively tomorrow. I find myself watching the older teachers with admiration and a certain envy. And, of course, I enjoy very much also my evenings like this away from school in your salon, and my life in Cambridge. They have much in common with my former life in Vienna.” And he did not add, although he must have been tempted,
and everything is so very American
.

She pressed again. “And for the future?”

“As for the future,” Arnauld said, “we shall see.”

And in a rare moment of candor she found herself confiding, “I want so for you to be happy here, Arnauld. And I worry.”

And returning the rare candor, Arnauld looked into her face and saw the worry. “I do not wish to cause you concern. Being beside you means the world to me. You know that I will do whatever is necessary to continue being there.”

And then Eleanor caught herself. “Well,” she said. “We shall just have to work all the harder to make sure that you are totally entertained.” And she smiled and patted his arm before leading him away toward the others in their party.

During this whole time, Eleanor depended heavily on Will Honeycutt as a factor in the entertainment of Arnauld, and from the beginning she marveled at the way the two men found mutual attraction.

“We argue,” Will said to her one day, with a great smile. “Each thinks of the other as his equal.”

“In your case,” Eleanor said, “that is saying something. And what do you argue about?”

“Descartes and the Enlightenment,” Will said. “The validity of psychology as a science. You know, grand ideas like that.”

“I would love to listen in.”

“Oh,” Will said with a smile, “I fear we generated more heat than light. But we both enjoy the exchange. Arnauld is such a respectful man, I think he enjoys our moments of irreverence.”

“You serve as a good provocateur,” she said with a smile, thinking of those two minds ranging over the course of European philosophy, Arnauld the devout classicist and Will Honeycutt the upstart American scientist, an introvert and an extrovert, her friend Jung would point out, each fully able to keep up with the other.

It was at Eleanor’s instigation that Will first invited the young Viennese to visit Cambridge with him. “He will appreciate getting to know the Harvard you know,” Eleanor said, always thinking of how to make Arnauld’s new American life more compelling. “And it would mean a great deal to me. Cambridge will remind him of his university days in Vienna perhaps. He will feel very much at home.” And so he did, so much so that he solicited further invitations, and soon the two new friends made regular visits to Cambridge a part of life. The two young men grew accustomed to sitting in cafés and walking along the Charles.

“Arnauld is exceedingly good company,” Will reported back, “although a little idealistic.”

“And what would he say about that?” Eleanor asked, amused.

“Oh, he might say that I am a bit obstreperous.” Then he paused and laughed, “We balance each other well, actually, the poet and the iconoclast.”

And Arnauld reported in his own way how he liked very much Will’s common sense and practical manner. “An American pragmatist,” he said. “I find him refreshing. He would liven up our coffeehouse discussions back in Vienna, that is for sure.”

“And not too abrasively?” Eleanor asked.

“Oh my, no,” Arnauld said. “It is good for us stuffy Europeans to get a taste of true practicality.”

It was clear to Eleanor after a time that the two men had become quite fond of each other and fond of their “discursives,” as they called them,
those “discursives” accounting for the difference in tone. If there was any discussion between the two men of a certain deep and unsatisfied emotion that they had in common, it was never mentioned to Eleanor, to her great relief.

Then the horrible unrest in Europe intruded. For months, the two friends Arnauld and Will Honeycutt would talk and argue about the rivalries of the various European countries.

“An unhealthy tension,” Will Honeycutt would say, pointing a finger at the German kaiser, as if the kaiser’s very demeanor were Arnauld’s responsibility.

“Business as usual,” Arnauld would counter, “just saber rattling. Nothing out of the ordinary. The German people are actually very peaceful, but the kaiser and the generals are like peacocks parading in their uniforms, taking themselves too seriously. They have built up a war machine, but I think they and the French will hold each other at bay.”