The Lost Prince (47 page)
Eleanor had decided long before this visit to keep to herself the reason for her return to Vienna. As far as the family was concerned, Eleanor was there to grieve with them and to tell about what an honored presence their son had been at a small New England boys’ school thousands of miles away across the Atlantic Ocean.
“Arnauld was considered a great teacher,” she said after the affectionate salutations. “He was thought to have a great future.”
Arnauld’s parents nodded quietly and absorbed the observation. “Much has been lost in this war,” Herr Esterhazy said.
“Yours is the loss of a dear son,” she added solemnly, “mine the loss of a dear friend.” She paused and looked into the grief-worn faces.
“We know of the place you hold—” Frau Esterhazy caught herself. “We know the place you held in our son’s heart.”
And it was in that moment alone with Arnauld’s mother that Eleanor was struck by a depth of feeling she had not anticipated. She felt a rush of what could be described only as guilt, that she had lured this woman’s son away from his home and coerced him into feelings and actions beyond what was appropriate.
“I am so very sorry,” she said.
“I know that,” his mother said, and then as if it were a most natural sequitur, she asked suddenly, “Have you visited Arnauld’s childhood friend Alma? I know she would enjoy hearing of his life in Boston.”
“Standish and I will visit her tomorrow.”
Arnauld’s mother rolled her eyes ever so slightly. “Alma is very different from our Arnauld. She has been married twice, you know, and is
very”—she paused—“artistic. But they were very close as children, something you might not have guessed. Alma’s father and mother were close friends of ours. Oh my, what a painter he was. We have a few of his paintings in this house.”
“I knew her slightly in my time in Vienna twenty years ago, and we saw each other in New York and Boston when Herr Mahler came to America.”
“Alma has been very good to us,” Herr Esterhazy said. “She has visited a number of times since the news.”
“You will have to pardon Herr Esterhazy,” the mother said when he left the room to bring the wine. “We were opponents of war long before our country’s current debacle,” she said. “He has lost his dear son, the light of his life, to a cause he did not believe in.” She paused.
Herr Esterhazy returned with a tray and three glasses of clear cold white wine. “This is the famous
heuriger
wine,” he said with a proud smile, “the new wine that the Viennese are so crazy for.”
They talked about Arnauld as they drank the wine, and then Frau Esterhazy rose and gathered up the empty glasses and retired with them.
“You will have to pardon my wife,” the father said quietly when she left the room with the tray of glasses. “For her, it is the absence as much of his letters as of his physical presence. There will be no more letters.”
“I am aware of the terrible grief in the loss of a son.”
“You know the details, I assume, Frau Burden,” Arnauld’s father said with sudden seriousness.
“I know of some. I would like to hear everything you know.”
Herr Esterhazy paused as if to gather strength. “We received a notification from the emperor’s chief of staff directly,” he continued. “Arnauld had allowed himself to be assigned to the front and had been placed in charge of a group of Italian prisoners, a group of officers to be placed in a train car, when an artillery shell exploded in their midst. It was a horrible scene, we were told, spared the details of course, but a dreadful and hopeless disaster.”
“I am so very sorry,” Eleanor said.
“There is much loss in this regrettable war,” the old man said, his eyes filling with tears. “Ours is but a small portion of it.”
She let the conclusion stand, not sharing with either parent her strong conviction that Arnauld was not dead. “Your loss is enormous,” Eleanor said, “I know that. Arnauld was a fine and sensitive man, with great promise.”
“A fine and sensitive man,” Herr Esterhazy repeated slowly, savoring the words, amused. “He was the third son of a third son, far from the primogenitor role in this family, as was I, his father. He wished to be a teacher of history, in America.”
“I hope that was not a disappointment to you.”
“Oh, no,” Herr Esterhazy said. “We were quite proud always of his passionate spirit. To be a teacher is a noble calling.”
“And a very good teacher,” Eleanor said. “His American school is in mourning.”
“I can imagine,” the father said, and he looked up as a handsome young man around Arnauld’s age entered the room. He had a decided limp. “Oh,” said Herr Esterhazy, “here is my nephew, Michelangelo.”
The man approached, holding out his hand and smiling broadly. Eleanor, startled at first, reached out her hand reflexively and found it in the vigorous grasp of Arnauld’s cousin Miggo Sabatini.
“I thought—” she stammered.
“You thought me dead,” he said. “The world thinks me dead. I have a long story to tell, but I am now very much among the living.”
At luncheon she sat beside Miggo and he told her at least the rudimentary details of how he was seriously wounded on the first day of fighting, taken prisoner, escaped, and spent the duration of the war there in Austria, “Hiding from both sides,” he said with a smile.
“Did no one know you were alive?” she said.
“I was a deserting officer and an escaped prisoner of war. I didn’t wish anyone to know.”
“And your parents?” Eleanor said with a frown.
“They would have to wait like everyone else. After Caporetto, after the sadness with Arnauld, I wrote them.”
After lunch, he pulled up his pant leg and showed Eleanor a deep and jagged scar, running from ankle to knee. “I did not wish to spoil your meal,” he said. “A piece of shrapnel from one side or another tore up my calf. I nearly died from the infection.”
A single sheet found among Eleanor Burden’s papers tells the story of Miggo’s experience. It is written on both sides, in Eleanor’s hand, probably from sometime after the telling. It is in an attempt, no doubt, to round out the larger story.
Lieutenant Michelangelo Sabatini had joined the Italian army, like Arnauld resurrecting his officer commission from his university days, and chose Italian over his other citizenships probably because that choice offered the most flair and the least risk of actually going to war. On the opening day of hostilities in 1915, he found himself at the head of a caravan heading across the Friuli plain in what he thought would be a quick and easy offensive action and then a triumphant entry into Trieste as a liberator, all of this attracting his sense of adventure. And so on that first day he found himself totally by surprise stopped dead by heavy Austrian artillery as soon as they crossed the Isonzo River. The consequence was brutal and bloody, and he spent more than a day lying badly wounded among the dead and maimed, himself nearly ripped apart by shrapnel from an exploding shell.
He saw enough of war in those two days, he later explained, to let him know that he wanted no part of it, and that he had made a horrible mistake. He and what was left of his expeditionary group were taken prisoner and carted to an Austrian field hospital, where there was much confusion. When an Austrian medical officer came by with a handful of papers trying to identify the dead and dying, Miggo found himself in possession of a report form and filled it out with his name as one of the deceased and dropped it on the ground, where it was picked up by a nurse who assumed the officer had dropped it. In the quiet of night, he dragged himself across a line in the field hospital, and in among the Austrian wounded he blacked out and nearly bled to death in the effort.
That is how he ended up as an “unknown” in an Austrian hospital, and how word arrived at Italian army headquarters that he had been killed in battle. He spent six months recuperating from his near-fatal wounds and then one day simply limped out of the hospital and spent the remainder of the war in Budapest, assuming the identity of a Bohemian poet unfit for military service because of a
bad leg, and trying to find a way to escape to America, where he would not be identified as a prisoner of war or a deserter. Eventually, he found his way into the company of some Esterhazy relatives, and there was no mention of his having been in the Italian army.
After the armistice, he arrived at the door of his uncle and aunt, Arnauld’s parents, where he was taken in without question, still with plans to end up in America, after things settled down. It was from there that his availability would prove to be invaluable.
As Eleanor and Standish were preparing to leave, Frau Esterhazy pulled Eleanor aside, and when the two women found themselves alone, the older woman spoke. “There is something I wish you to have. You may take it with you and return it when you are finished.” She handed Eleanor a tin container the size of a small hatbox. “These are Arnauld’s letters of the past ten years, from even before the time he first left for Boston. You and your son are featured prominently in them, you will see.” She held the box tightly for a moment before releasing it. “There is in here information that you must know, but must hold with the highest confidentiality.” Arnauld’s mother kept her eyes fixed on Eleanor. Her look was one of the deepest fondness. “I believe that my son worshipped you,” she whispered.
“And Arnauld held a special place for me,” Eleanor said. “As you perhaps already know.”
Later, in the quiet privacy of her old room at Fräulein Tatlock’s, Eleanor opened the tin box and read uninterrupted through the collection of simply and thoroughly detailed letters of a loving son to his parents. What she held in her hands was an extraordinary description of Arnauld’s life, even during the war. What was remarkable about this collection of letters was the description of Boston and Arnauld’s newfound life there, and of course his emotional attachment to Eleanor.
In some ways the letters to his parents were the observations of a stranger in a foreign land, life in one of the oldest of brash young American cities so vastly different from the café culture of Vienna in which Arnauld had grown up. “Americans are confident and friendly, without
the reserve of Europeans, and yet well informed and unafraid of depth. I wish to stay here for some time.”
Eleanor realized from the start the candid and intimate nature of these letters home and felt honored to have been given them by the author’s mother. Over the course of this first reading, she became amused anew by how unlike her husband, Frank, this writer was. Her friend Carl Jung would have found the two of them excellent models for the theory of personality type he was developing. Whereas Arnauld was sensitive and self-analytical, always seeking connection, Frank was abrupt and self-assured, always seeking to be definitive, decisive. Whereas Arnauld embraced change and the excitement of an evolving world, Frank met each day as if yesterday, today, and tomorrow would be the same, “as it is now it ever will be.” Arnauld’s sensitivity radiated a deep feeling that Jung would have immediately identified with the feminine. As she read the letters, she found herself moved many times. The articulate grace of this extraordinary young man, now in his late thirties, struck her over and over as she read his eloquent descriptions of the life she had shared with him, at least in part, during his time in Boston. But as she came to the last of the letters, the flow stopped first by his return to Vienna in 1914 and then by his disappearance, an enormous sadness began to settle on her. This was the man whose life had become inexorably linked to hers, the man whose physical well-being had suddenly become of utmost importance to her.