The Lost Prince (7 page)

They met on the Harvard campus, in the ancient hall that housed the physics department, in a small office cluttered with books and laboratory paraphernalia. As Eleanor engaged him in conversation, she could not help recalling some of the pejorative comments she had heard about him in her researches.

“He talks to himself,” a fellow graduate student assigned as his laboratory partner is reported to have complained to his advisor.

“Listen well,” the advisor is said to have quipped. “You might learn something.”

Even before his famous senior thesis, just as one faculty member was tearing his hair in exasperation another was reporting a conversation with him that showed great vision and clarity. In one famous faculty discussion, one teacher is reported to have said, “Honeycutt is the kind of mind that every university would like to have within its walls.”

“There is another institution down the road,” a colleague responded, “the state hospital, that specializes in having his kind within its walls.”

Whatever talents or future this young graduate student possessed were not immediately apparent to her as she sat with him in his cluttered little room. In fact, her immediate reaction was to wonder how someone this disorganized had earned his strong reputation. Later, she admitted to being suspicious, discouraged even, but she was looking for a T. Williams Honeycutt. What other choice was there?

“Thank you for seeing me,” she said after taking his hand. “I know this must be peculiar for you.”

“I don’t often have visitors in here,” he said, gesturing to the clutter in his office and offering a gentle smile that Eleanor, much to her surprise, found reassuring. He was of medium height, lean of build, and only slightly ill at ease having a visitor intrude into the confined space of his office. “I’m not the sort that people come to visit.” Almost as an afterthought, he cleared off a chair and offered it. “And just why are you here?” There was a kind of gracelessness to his question.

“I will be direct,” Eleanor said. “I have come on a mission, Mr. Honeycutt. I have heard of your brilliance.”

“Heavens, no,” he said. “Just an eternal predoctorate student, trying
to get all of this organized”—again, he gestured around the room with his hand—“into something my betters will accept as a dissertation. The university is waiting for me to produce something of value. I wrote a controversial paper in my senior year that got everyone’s attention. Now they want me to prove it.”

“I have heard,” Eleanor said.

“I guess I stumbled onto some ideas no one else had thought of.”

“A dialogue with Democritus, was it not?”

He looked startled for a moment. “You have heard.”

“I have,” she said. “You caused quite a stir. And I have heard of your method: a dialogue with a character in your dreams. Some call it brilliant.”

Honeycutt laughed. “And some called it deranged.
Schizophrenic,
I believe they say, one who hears voices.”

“But everyone agrees what came out in this dialogue was brilliant.”

“Even if it came from derangement?” He paused, looking suddenly very nervous and distracted. “It is about the atom, you know. Those who believe my dialogue to be of value wish for me to read and research everything known so far and think perhaps that I have said—without knowing it—something new and revolutionary. They wish me to
grow into it,
I believe those who believe say.”

“And those who do not believe?”

“They wish to have me committed.”

“And what do you say?”

“Somewhere in between, I guess. Democritus really did appear in my dreams, and he spoke for himself within the dream. That is not so demented, is it? To have someone speak in a dream?”

“No,” she said. “I would say it is quite normal.”

“I was just the scribe. I did not try to explain anything on my own. I just wrote it down. I guess that is the disturbing part for some.”

“Disturbing for you?” she asked.

Ted Honeycutt looked away. “Oh, no, I have been living within my head for a long time. I am like the ancient alchemists, my professors say, always looking for the
prima materia,
but it comes with a problem.”

“And that is?”

“I seek this
prima materia,
they say, at the expense of my relations with people.”

“William James thinks you brilliant.”

Suddenly, the young man’s mood changed. “You don’t know that,” he snapped. “It is rumored, but you don’t know that.”

The words took her aback for an instant. “I do know it,” she said, not backing off. “In fact, I know it quite well.”

“How could you know such a thing?” There was what seemed like defiance now in his eyes.

“Dr. James told me.”

Honeycutt scrutinized her seriously for a moment, then softened. “You know Dr. James?”

“He is my godfather,” she said. “He was a great friend of my deceased mother. We confer with some regularity and with some intimacy. In the flesh,” she added, trying unsuccessfully for a note of levity. “He had you in class, I believe. I asked him about you, and he has mentioned a very high regard.”

Ted Honeycutt looked her over for a long moment, still skeptical. “You know that?” he said. “William James really told you that?”

“I know that. He really told me that. He read your thesis when a friend in the physics department gave it to him, and he gave it to me to read. He told me when I asked that he was very impressed.”

“Well, that is something,” Honeycutt said, still without humor. Then he stopped and looked suspicious for a long moment. “Why were you asking about me?”

“I told you that I am on a mission. I am looking for someone to come work with me.”

“Doing what?” he asked abruptly. “What could someone like me possibly do for someone like you?”

“Quite a bit, actually.”

“You are interested in working with atoms?”

“No, it is nothing to do with atoms. It is a business project. Investments, to be precise, stocks and bonds.”

The young physics student looked confused. Then he laughed dismissively. “You did not do your homework very carefully, madam. I am a scientist,” he said, “I’m not a businessman.”

“Actually, I did my homework, and quite thoroughly,” she said quickly, wishing not to lose ground or to be put off by his gracelessness, about which she had been warned. “Scientific or not is no concern of mine. I am
looking for someone bright and eager—brilliant even—to be my partner in a business venture, and from what I can gather, you are a perfect candidate.” She did not let on that it was his name alone that was the source of her present conviction.

“I am difficult,” he said, still without an ounce of humor.

“All the better,” she said. She was not being completely candid, certainly not where her own misgivings were involved. What she really wished to say was that she knew the name and that was all, and he was the only match she could find. In a way, she was desperate. “I am looking for someone smart, efficient, and discreet,” Eleanor said, “and someone named T. Williams Honeycutt. And from what I have been able to discover, you are all of those.”

The eccentric physics student looked uncomfortable and eyed his guest suspiciously. “You have investigated me,” he said.

“I have indeed. This is an important maneuver on my part. I need to make a series of investments, over the next few years. I am confident that I will know at the time exactly what those investments will be, and I know what returns they will bring. I need an assistant to carry them out.”

“And you think that I am that person?”

“I do. In fact, I am quite convinced. And I am willing to offer a year’s salary in the form of shares in a stock purchase I have just made. As they increase in value and as you pursue a parallel course to the one I will be tracking, you will become a very wealthy man.”

“Has it occurred to you that you have made a mistake in identity?”

“I am well past that uncertainty,” she said. “You are T. Williams Honeycutt, are you not?”

“Of course I am,” he said with something close to contempt.

“And are you aware of another such T. Williams Honeycutt?” She asked the question on the reasonable assumption that he, having had the name all his life, would know more about the possibility of duplication than anyone else.

“That is a strange question,” he said with a pause that she should have noticed with concern. “I am the only one I know. Who else would have such a mouthful of a name?”

“Well, then you are the one I am looking for.” There was a finality to her statement that brought the young physics student to silence, which he held for a long moment.

“Well, I am very much afraid that I cannot help you.”

“Are you certain of that, absolutely certain?”

“Absolutely certain,” he said, yet again gesturing around the room. “I have my job to do here.”

She allowed a long, uncomfortable silence to fall between them before she spoke. “I have prepared for this eventuality.” She opened her purse and withdrew a small envelope. “I have a reward for your troubles. This is a letter of commitment to give you one share in Cincinnati Soap and Candle Company, the company I have just invested in. The share is worth, by my reckoning, the small sum of twenty-five dollars. One share,” she repeated. “I would like you to take it and to keep track of its progress in the stock market. Do you follow the stock market?”

“I can’t say that I do. I know a good deal about the periodic tables and about Sir Isaac Newton’s basic physical principles, and I have no interest in stocks and bonds. In fact, I find the whole world of finance a bore.”

Undeterred by his brusqueness of manner, Eleanor pressed on. “Take this letter and set it aside, wait a few months, and follow this particular stock and you will watch your twenty-five dollars increase in value manyfold.”

He eyed the envelope in her hands suspiciously. “All right,” he said, “if you insist.” Thinking back on the exchange sometime later, she realized that the young man’s abrasive manner actually helped her mask her own uncertainty as to how her recent purchase was to fare, and it allowed her to continue with this unlikely recruitment she knew was required of her. “But what is the catch?” he continued without grace.

“There is no catch, I just want you to wait and watch. And then I want you to imagine how your fortunes would have changed had you received from me today a full year’s salary in this stock, which I was prepared to offer you.” She held out the envelope and kept it extended until the young man, still suspicious, took it from her. “You will contact me when you have seen enough and you are convinced.”

“Well, all right,” he said, taking the envelope. “But I doubt very much that I shall be calling you.”

“You have great strengths, I hear. Remember that Dr. James describes you as brilliant.”

Ted Honeycutt’s demeanor changed to the closest he could come to civility. “I like you, Miss Putnam. I really do. But I see atoms and molecules
in my future, not stocks and bonds. You have just engaged in a complete waste of time.”

“Very well,” she said, rising. “I fully understand. But you will discover that I am a very determined woman, and that I want very much for you to join me in this effort.”

“Again, I do not wish to be offensive,” he said. “But I think perhaps that you are the one here not fully in control of your senses.”

“That may be,” Eleanor said, “but I wanted to bring your attention to bear on my project, and I hope I have done that.”

“But how are you on your side so certain that I am the one you are looking for?”

“I am also, as you will further discover, a highly intuitive person, Mr. Honeycutt. I am here on the very strongest of intuitive hunches. I am very definitively certain that you are exactly the one I am looking for, and I greatly hope that you will come around.” She pointed to the envelope now in his hand. “And with that envelope I rest my case.”

And with that envelope Eleanor had made, unknowingly, a fateful move.

“DISASTER AVERTED, IT APPEARS”

S
ometime after her return from her adventure in Cincinnati and her initial meeting with the graduate student T. Williams Honeycutt, her fiancé, Frank Burden, ever the serious banker, oblivious to Eleanor’s having successfully completed the loan, came to her with an article he had found among his bank’s news resources. “Disaster averted, it appears,” he said with a helpful and satisfied smile. “I am exceedingly glad that your interests were only hypothetical. That soap company you were inquiring about is going bankrupt.” Frank laid an investment news sheet opened out in front of her. Eleanor could only stare in disbelief.

The article was succinct and highly unflattering. Cincinnati Soap and Candle was indeed headed for insolvency, it appeared. The company’s owner, a certain Homer Smith, was portrayed as irrational, unable and unwilling to sell the company to what he perceived as the greedy giant attempting to take it over.
IRASCIBLE OWNER GOING DOWN WITH THE SHIP
, the headline read, a shame, the article concluded, because Workman’s Soap was a “superior product,” one any company, large or small, would be happy to call its own, and CS & C was a proud old family company being run to the ground by a stubborn grandson of the founder.

“It is good that you have left the interpretation of the investment world to those with heads for it,” Frank said.

Eleanor managed to maintain a poised façade. “And what if someone had in fact made such an investment?” she asked with outer calm.

“Well, he would have lost practically everything,” Frank said coldly.
“Bankrupt stock has no value.” Then after further thought he added, “Or some opportunist sweeps in and buys at a ridiculously low price.” Frank Burden always took on a paternal air when explaining any of the rudiments of high-level finance or the stock market or any areas of business to his, he assumed, naïve and inexperienced fiancée. “Again, you see,” he added patiently, “it is best to leave the serious decisions to the men of finance. That is what we are for.”

And that night Eleanor, feeling cold and alone, was confronted by the reality of ruination, a despondency that stayed with her for days. She sat in her living room on Acorn Street, uncertain of the timing but fully aware that disaster loomed ahead, wondering how she should have played out her assigned hand differently.
What have I done?
she thought as she itemized the details of the decision.
What other choice was there?
There were no easy answers, no easy peace, and no one with whom to share her dejection.