The Lost Prince (32 page)
“One hears that the kaiser is a belligerent bully,” Will said, trying to get a rise out of his friend.
Arnauld grimaced. “It is difficult to think of fate in the hands of such a character, is it not? He was a Hapsburg cousin, and Prince Rudolf couldn’t stand him. It is said that the dread of seeing this artless, graceless cousin succeeding was one of the despairs that drove him to his act at Mayerling.”
“Let’s hope that he calms himself down,” Will said.
“Let us hope,” Arnauld repeated.
“It doesn’t look very good to me.”
“Nor to me,” Arnauld finally admitted.
JUST THIS ONCE
E
ach summer, Arnauld would travel home to Austria, as was perfectly natural. Often during these summers some Boston families would schedule visits to see him in Vienna on their European tours. He returned the favor of their hospitality in Boston, with introduction to café life and to the theater and the opera, always saying how much he was looking forward to his return at summer’s end to his life at St. Gregory’s and Boston.
Each time she would hear from one of the returning families, Eleanor would smile inwardly and marvel at how, in spite of the ups and downs, things had worked out exactly as they should have, all the time aware of the coming war and Arnauld Esterhazy’s fateful role in it.
So Arnauld’s decision to leave Boston for Vienna in the summer of 1914 was nothing unusual or dramatic, and nothing to do with the international tension in Europe. He had left each of the three previous summers during his time teaching at St. Gregory’s, and this time he had even asked Will Honeycutt to join him for part of the summer, which Will initially agreed to until at the last minute demands of the Hyperion Fund intruded. “Next summer then,” Arnauld said with confidence. But that was in April. By the June departure date, he had lost some of that confidence.
“You will be sailing into a hornet’s nest, my friend,” Will Honeycutt said.
“I tend to agree with you,” Arnauld said, adding, “This time it is my premonition.”
“You are sounding downright fatalistic,” Will said. “Not unlike your host, Mrs. Burden.”
“She is indeed somewhat fatalistic,” Arnauld reflected. “It is as if she knows something of the future that we do not.” Will Honeycutt did not respond.
He would sail for Europe shortly after classes ended for the spring term, spend the summer in Vienna and with his parents at their nearby vineyard, and then return in time for the opening of school in early September. But this time, with the palpable tension that seemed to have spread throughout Europe, at least a few people were apprehensive. “What if you got over there and couldn’t get back?” one friend on the St. Gregory’s faculty said.
But Arnauld always dismissed the concern with what had become for him a quick and always good-natured retort, “Oh, I don’t think German belligerence is all it is made out to be.”
“And what of Austria’s tensions with Serbia?” his knowledgeable friend responded. And that too Arnauld dismissed as overreaction. He would sail in mid-June and be “back in time for football season,” he said with a good deal of amusement, as American football seemed to him the most curious of national passions, one he greatly enjoyed nonetheless. “If I were to be reborn,” he announced after his second fall at St. Gregory’s, “I would want to be an American football hero.”
Eleanor Burden had made a point of increasing his invitations to Acorn Street as his departure date approached. From the moment of his coming to Boston to teach, he had loved his time at the Burden home; in fact, he had written home to his parents on a number of occasions describing exactly his impression of the warm and cultured reception he found there.
Eleanor Burden is the most beautiful hostess, elegant and receptive, always poised and ever willing to lead discussions on French painting, Italian cuisine, voting rights for women, transcendentalism, or any of a number of interesting topics. She manages her family with an efficient grace and warmth. Her daughters are delicately well mannered and yet full of life. Her husband, Frank Burden, a serious and formal
banker, a bit stiff and gruff perhaps outside the home, warms to her attentions and is also a splendid and welcoming host. It is he, by the way, who has encouraged my rowing on the Charles River, the single scull to which I have become so attentively fixed. But it is Eleanor Burden herself who fills my life here in Boston with positive energy. The thought of being in her presence anywhere in this city is for me the pleasure that sustains me during my week of teaching, and the actuality of being in her home is a pleasure complete enough to sustain thoughts of living in Boston for a long time.
To his old friend Alma, recently widowed by the tragic death of Gustav Mahler in 1911, knowing her interest in intrigues of the heart, he wrote something even more emotionally specific:
Only to you would I ever admit such a thing, but I absolutely worship the ground she walks on. I see her in her daily life, so full of organizational poise and confidence, and I come away each time newly inspired. She is a social leader in Boston, for sure. Everyone at the school thinks the world of her. She is a kind and dedicated parent of her two girls. And in the evenings at her beautiful home, she is so serene and gracious that one would think she had not a care or responsibility in the world, knowing full well that quite the opposite is true. She is indeed the vision of loveliness of my dreams.
So it was that Arnauld had become accustomed to spending occasional evenings in her home and staying the night in the guest room on Acorn Street instead of being driven home late. His last night in Boston that June would be no different. He would spend it in the Burden home on the eve of his train trip to New York City and the steamship from Hoboken, New Jersey, to Bremen, Germany, the next day. “We will send you off in good fashion so you will remember to return,” Eleanor said lightly in offering the invitation.
“Oh, I shall always remember to return,” Arnauld replied, with an assurance that betrayed the rather desperate feelings he would encounter on occasion when thinking of somehow losing her presence in his life.
“You mustn’t be so serious,” Eleanor said this time on the eve of this parting. “You will never lose us, Arnauld.” And as always when she talked of the future, he noticed something very firm and reassuring in her voice.
“You always sound so confident when talking of things to come,” he said.
She knew what had to be done and had begun planning weeks in advance, carrying out her tasks with her usual thoroughness, making certain that the girls were spending the night away and that Frank would seize an opportunity to be in New York, even noticing in the cycle of her own biology that her body would be perfectly ready. Then just as the final pieces of her planning all fell into place, Arnauld discovered that due to unexpected repairs necessary to his steamer his departure date was to be postponed a week, and the whole business seemed to go disastrously awry, causing her to fall into a secret despair she knew well from so many times before.
And then, by some miracle, Arnauld received word that, the repairs made, his sailing date had been moved back to its original time, and as had happened also so many times before, everything fell miraculously into place. On that early summer night of 1914, she carried out the final details of her assignment with a careful sense of ritual, like a temple priestess, she told herself. But she did not realize in advance the intensity with which the experience would catch her by total surprise and leave her filled with desire and longing, and, four years later, unspeakable grief.
That fateful night of Arnauld’s departure in 1914, she knew at least part of the story. She knew that calamity awaited him in what looked to others like a harmless return to Vienna for his summer vacation, and she knew of the coming outbreak of war in Europe and Arnauld’s entanglement in it. She alone had foreknowledge of, and could do nothing to prevent, what was to be the forthcoming world conflagration, an all-consuming world war that would destroy a whole generation, and she knew that somehow—she knew not how—Arnauld would be swept up by it with devastating consequences. That knowledge weighed heavily on her as she prepared for his departure.
But she also knew the outcome and knew that somehow Arnauld would survive, return to Boston, and play a major role in the life of St. Gregory’s and her family. In fact, she had absolute faith at this time that Arnauld, the man with whom she was destined to share the deepest of
connections, no matter what he would endure in war, would emerge safely and to renew his life as a legendary teacher there.
As so many times before she knew what destiny would dictate, but she knew also that she had to act. It was once again that strange dance of her life, between the predestined and free will, between knowing what would happen in the future and knowing what she had to do to make it happen. So she knew well in advance exactly what outcome she was obligated to orchestrate on that evening in June 1914, on the eve of Arnauld’s departure.
He arrived with his bags that evening and laid out his tickets and travel papers on the bed to assure himself that he had everything in order. He would leave directly from the Burdens’ home on Beacon Hill to the Back Bay train station in the morning.
“Reports are that it is not easy crossing borders these days,” he said to Eleanor. “Every country seems to be suspicious of its neighbor.”
“Luckily, you will be crossing directly into Austria-Hungary. That is a relief, I suppose. At least the nations of the empire are friendly.”
“So far it seems so,” he said with a smile. “Although one can never tell with the Czechs.” Czechoslovakia lay between his arrival point in Bremen and his destination in Vienna.
It was not until after he had arrived on Acorn Street in the late afternoon and was preparing for the cocktail hour before dinner that he realized that Frank Burden was away on business, the girls were spending the night with a Putnam cousin in Cambridge, and Rose Spurgeon and the cook had been given the evening off. At first, he thought that Will Honeycutt might be joining them for dinner, but that too turned out not to be the case.
“Tonight, I have you all to myself,” Eleanor said, and Arnauld admitted to a rush of euphoria at the thought. Being alone with this woman who had sustained his definition of feminine perfection for almost twenty years was an elation like no other he could imagine. After all this time, he could think of no greater pleasure than sitting with her and her other guests in the Acorn Street living room—where William and Henry James had sat years before, during her parents’ time. He doubted that Eleanor, with all her elegant detachment, had any idea how much she actually meant to him.
“I am glad for it,” was all he said, and then offered, “We have much of my travels to review,” as an attempt to mask his true feelings.
On Eleanor’s part, in preparing for the evening, with its fateful implications, she had struggled for the proper attitude and approach, until, that is, she recalled the one image in Will Honeycutt’s sketchbook, the one she had shared with Carl Jung. Having been introduced to the goddess Isis of Will Honeycutt’s drawings and realizing the likeness to her, and the significance of that, she found that she now had a new and highly useful image of herself.