The Lost Prince (38 page)

What a fool she had been to believe the preposterousness of the journal’s preordination anyway. Granted, over the twenty years there had been events and details she had known of in advance: the incredible investments, tasks she needed to perform, the tragedy of the
Titanic,
in all of which she had had no choice or control, and all of which she had been able to tell no one. But now everything had come to an end, with this one death in war, in the midst of so many deaths in war.

That was when Eleanor was revisited by the dream, “The Big Dream,” Carl Jung had called it some years before when she first wrote to him of it. It came to her again, leaving her suddenly awake in the cold sweat of panic. In the dream that first night, she found herself perched on the top of a huge iceberg, in the middle of a glassy sea. She sat precariously, fearful that she would slide off. Below her, at the waterline, she could see a
large long swath of red paint, and below that she was aware of the huge mass extending far below into the deep. The depth of ocean beneath her, thousands of feet, gave her an even greater feeling of dread. As she began to slide, desperately digging in with her heels and fingernails, she always woke up, sweating and gasping for breath.

She was barely holding on, barely holding herself together, barely coping with this unpredictable and undeniable turn of events. She went about her life on Acorn Street without animation, like a ghost. She could tell no one of her immense shock, and no one except Rose Spurgeon, who had just lost her husband in the early throes of what was to become a terrible pandemic, seemed to notice. “What is the matter, ma’am?” Rose asked, she who herself had just lost so grievously. “You aren’t getting sick, are you?”

“Nothing, Rose. I seem to have a touch of something, that’s all. Nothing to worry about.”

And then Susan became ill.

For twenty years, Eleanor’s faith had been tested, for sure, but always affirmed in the end. What was supposed to happen somehow always happened, but now this fateful turn. She had believed from reading the journal that she and her family would be spared, but now with Arnauld dead, killed in the war, anything was possible. The future was wide open.

That the news of his death had come at the time of the dreaded influenza, with Boston one of the most severely affected of American cities, only added to Eleanor’s consternation. The epidemic had begun on an army base in Kansas, in the spring of 1918, generated suddenly, it was conjectured, from the widespread burning of pig manure, and emanated to other army bases throughout the country. A dark unnatural cloud settled on the area, it was remembered, and then the sicknesses began. American soldiers carried the pestilence to Europe, where it spread and grew in virulence, then came back with a vengeance, spreading quickly to army bases, Camp Devens near Boston being one of the hardest hit. It was not long before the dreadful pestilence distributed itself in the civilian populations, especially in the big cities of the East Coast, attacking—uncharacteristic of flus in general—the youngest and healthiest, giving it more the appearance of plague than flu.

Wherever it arrived, hospitals and clinics were overwhelmed, medical staffs—already depleted by war service in Europe—were stretched to the breaking point, and emergency tents were set up to care for the affected. Flu victims were encouraged to move to large makeshift infirmaries, for reasons of both treatment and quarantine, lying in hallways, waiting for the dying to relinquish their beds. There were so many deaths, such inevitability, that nurses actually wrapped patients in sheets and affixed toe tags even before they died.

Eventually, in the span of less than a year, the influenza would kill some five hundred thousand Americans. The pandemic spread just as the country had decided to join the conflict in Europe. It was President Wilson’s decision to put thousands of soldiers together in the tight quarters of troopships. The disease spread among them and then to soldiers on both sides in the European theater, war and microbes being in collusion.

The American influenza led eventually to fifty million deaths worldwide, becoming a major part of the casualties for both sides in the war. It was the worst epidemic in American history, and the most demoralizing because of its attack on the most vigorous and robust. As their lungs filled with fluid, influenza victims simply drowned. In October 1918, when American soldiers were fully invested in joining the fight and making their impact in the European war, the death toll hit its peak.

There were peculiarities. For some reason, the epidemic, probably begun in Kansas, bore the name Spanish Flu, most likely, because Spain, not at war, did not censor its press and was the only nation to admit up front the pervasive devastation of the illness. In the late fall and winter of 1918 and 1919, only months after its most devastating entry, about the time of the great armistice, the impact waned dramatically.

“The flu ran out of vulnerable victims,” said Tom Ballantine, the Burdens’ longtime Boston doctor. “We had no idea how it got here or how to stop it. It just arrived, killed off everyone it could, then moved on.” It seemed to be over as quickly as it had arrived. But not before it entered the sanctuary of the Burdens’ Acorn Street home.

It was Tom Spurgeon who became sick first. One afternoon he complained of pain in his abdomen and by nightfall he was in bed in the Spurgeons’ quarters off the kitchen. By the next day, he had become unable to move and Eleanor called Tom Ballantine, who had already become alarmed by cases he had seen around the city. He only shook his head
when he told Rose what he had found, and a day later Tom was struggling with his breathing and high fever, and he died.

The family had hardly had time to grieve or plan the service when Susan came down with the symptoms, and Tom Ballantine found himself again called to the Burden house, and again shaking his head. Rose did not falter. “You go be with your family,” Eleanor had said to Rose after Tom’s funeral, when the dreaded illness paid its second visit to Acorn.

“I shall stay. I shall be the one to sit with her,” Rose said. “I am already exposed.” Eleanor was impressed then, as she would be many times, by the strength the woman received from her Catholic faith.

Against Tom Ballantine’s advice, Rose and Eleanor took turns beside Susan in the child’s bedroom, administering to her needs as the young girl began burning up with fever. The family became frantic with worry, and Rose Spurgeon argued with her mistress: “Let me stay beside her,” she said. “You take care of the others.”

But Eleanor would have none of it. She took up her place beside Susan’s bed. “I will sit with my daughter,” she said with that fierce conviction of hers that no one in the household would argue with, not even the staunch Frank Burden.

Even in their neighborhood there were cases of children dying from the dreaded flu. The wife of a colleague of Frank’s at the bank, another Smith College alumna, was one of the first in their circle of acquaintances to contract the disease and succumb to it, she the mother of three young children. The milkman who had included the Acorn Street house on his morning route for more than twenty years did not show up one morning, and a few days later they heard that he too was dead. One young mother in their neighborhood had heard of the cautions being spread about and had pronounced boldly that she did not intend to “live in fear,” took her infant daughter out onto the Boston streets in her baby carriage with no protective mask, and had lost her within two days.

Eleanor knew of the terrible impact of the loss of a child from sharing grief with Alma Mahler, Arnauld’s childhood friend in Vienna, whom she had befriended when the famous musician came to New York in 1907. Just before their departure for America back then, the Mahlers’ five-year-old daughter, Maria, had died painfully of diphtheria. It was an agonizing experience for both Alma and Gustav, one that neither of them ever got over and that caused Gustav to write some of his most haunting and poignant
music. Now the specter of childhood death was at the Burdens’ door.

The wise and kindly Tom Ballantine came and shook his head. “It has gone to her lungs,” he said with solemnity, and everyone knew what that meant. They made the decision to keep Susan at home, knowing full well the consequences, the risks of infection to the whole family.

Frank Burden, hero of countless athletic contests, including the first modern Olympics of 1896, extensive European traveler, international businessman of youthful promise, who had spent a lifetime perfecting a banker’s steely persona, hiding from the surface all the emotions of the weaker sex, was adamant. “You tend to Susan,” he said, affirming his wife’s decision to stay with her daughter. “The rest of us will fend as we must. You give Susan what she needs.”

Then Eleanor herself became ill, and fell into a deep fever, slipping away to join her mother, she thought in her fevered state, losing contact with the world.

“You must prepare for the worst,” Tom Ballantine told the staunch Frank Burden. And prepare he did, with a countenance grim even for him, deciding to stay at his wife’s side, in spite of the risk to his own health.

And this time Rose argued with the master of the house. “Let me be the one, Mr. Burden,” she said. She had just returned after being gone for two days, to take the body of her husband, Tom, back to Fall River for his funeral. “If we lost you, the children would be in a terrible way.”

But now Frank was the adamant one. “Thank you, Rose, but I shall stay by my wife’s side. If I take ill, so be it.”

Eleanor’s fever increased, and she could feel the searing pain invading her lungs.
This now is how it ends,
she thought, passing in and out of delirium, aware of her husband sitting beside her bed, her steadfast and loyal guardian, she now totally unable to care for her family as they had all become accustomed. She could only lie there in high fever, too weak to protest this further departure from the future that needed to be, imagining herself being transported to Vienna, the city of so many of her dreams.

In her delirium she became aware that Susan’s bed was empty and stripped beside hers. “What of Susan?” she would have asked had she been able. Racked with the pain of coughing, almost completely out of her mind, she was aware that everything was lost, but she herself now was too far gone to care. She lost all connection to the world of the living.

When she awoke finally, it was as if from a deep, fitful anesthesia. She saw the empty bed beside hers, and she knew the worst. “What of Susan?” she asked finally, barely able to form words. No answer came to spare her, and she stopped asking. Barely back to life herself, she was still too weak to care or to make herself understood. She passed back into the deepest of sleeps, as if dropping back into an underworld, this time peaceful and relieved of concern.

And she dreamed. The one she recalled later with great vividness was a return of the dream of her mother, dressed all in white, on a picnic blanket. She gestured for Eleanor, then the girl Weezie, to come sit down beside her. She was accompanied by a stranger, a handsome man, this time, also dressed in white, a bearded man who resembled Dr. James. They were lovers, and they welcomed her together. Each time the dream recurred, she tried to join her mother but never quite could.

Then one night, in the dream state, she became aware of another presence in the room, off in a recessed corner at first, almost unnoticeable, where she had been for a long time perhaps, then stepping out, unmistakable for the faint rattle of armor. It was the familiar guardian of her past come to stand watch, she of the fierce gray eyes and the Medusa medallion. “Have you always been there?” Eleanor asked, and the goddess only nodded and stood her ground. It was then that Eleanor fell again into the most peaceful sleep.

Her fever had broken, and she awoke to an unearthly, almost blissful calm. She rose from her bed, weak, and in her nightdress, she stepped out into the hallway, filled with dread at what she would find.

She walked like a ghost. Everyone was gone from the house, and she had the rooms and hallways to herself. Everything seemed to be in a haze, like the border area of a dream. At first there was only silence, then she heard music and drifted down the stairs to the living room, toward the sun porch, where the upright piano stood.

The music came to her more and more clearly and she recognized its probable source, but still not fully aware if she was imagining this or not, she came to the door of the sunroom and stood motionless. There before her were two young girls in white dresses, one before a music stand, playing an alto recorder, the other seated at the piano, her hands roaming over the keys. The sunlight spilled over them as they played, unaware of being watched. Beside them, in its case, was a cello, Eleanor’s cello. Many times
she had sat in that chair beside the piano, music stand in front of her, and played first with Susan, as she learned piano, and then adding Jane, as she began learning the recorder. The two girls looked up at the ghostlike figure in the doorway, and for a moment all three figures remained frozen, then they all burst into life.