The Lost Prince (37 page)
But Arnauld had a way of making everyone feel right, and he would smile and insist that Harvard and Harvard Square had much to offer and were indeed a fitting substitute for the stimulating café life of Vienna.
After the service Will approached Eleanor with uncharacteristic stoic reserve. She forced herself to match his demeanor with a stoicism she was
in no way feeling. “I was really attached to your man Arnauld,” he said solemnly, and Eleanor offered a wordless nod.
“I know, Will,” she said.
“He worshipped you, you know,” he offered suddenly, as if it even needed to be said. Eleanor, caught by surprise but accustomed to Will’s manner, only nodded and looked away. “I found it impossible to accept—” His voice broke and he paused, and she reached out and touched his arm and held firm.
“I know, Will,” she said.
She too had struggled with the reality, even after the second phone call, and then the letter had arrived from Jung just before the memorial service, and it had been the report from the man he hired in Vienna to do the requested research, a retired Viennese policeman named Franz Jodl who wrote with the grim details.
“He is gone,” Will had said upon reading the letter. “There is no room for question.”
Even Frank, not one to show emotion, had been moved. “One had hoped it wasn’t true,” he said, shaking his head slowly when he read it. “Young Esterhazy was easy to be fond of.”
Arnauld was indeed easy to become fond of. “He was sensitive, thoughtful,” the school chaplain had eulogized, “and he carried himself with an elegant grace, with what would have to be called a regal bearing,” and then he paused and added to the theme, “Arnauld was to us a visiting prince of the empire.”
The chaplain conjectured how Arnauld had become that way. “What forces had shaped such a man?” he said. “Raised in one of Europe’s most cultured cities, of notable and aristocratic Hungarian birth, seasoned in the fertile intellectual ground of fin de siècle café life. Arnauld Esterhazy studied philosophy and history at the university, but, having accepted the hereditary commission expected of his family,” he said, accounting for his being in the war, “he became an unlikely warrior, this encyclopedia of a man, this natural nurturer of our youngest and most senior minds, this gracious guest in our homes, this quiet student of Ovid and Homer. A great jolt of sadness has hit his colleagues, those many students who had
considered him among their best teachers, all of us who knew and loved this sensitive man of ideas, this man of peace.”
In all that was said of Arnauld Esterhazy on that day in the St. Gregory’s chapel, there emerged one absolute certainty, that, considering his intelligent sensitivity and gentle grace, the horrors of this particular war would have had on him—as it would have on so many sensitive young men on all sides—the most terrifying effect. And, as a sign of the enormous respect for this man, in the service in the St. Gregory’s chapel that day in 1918, there was no mention during the eulogies that he had died fighting for the enemy.
EDITH
S
he bore her grief alone. She had lost her link to the predestined future, granted, and that was bad enough, but there was so much more. Her immediate devastation came from the visceral, from the loss of this man she had known for so long, whose letters she had come to depend on, whose company she had cherished, and finally, whose very essence she had known in full forbidden intimacy, the man she knew was the father of her child. For three years, while he was away at war, she had found herself at times unable to stop thinking of him in ways no one would suspect, and now she could not stop feeling unexplainable loss.
Only a few people knew of her close association with Arnauld Esterhazy, the man departed. No one knew the completeness of her loss. The only letter of condolence on record, and one she prized most in a lifetime of letters, came from Baltimore, from her friend Edith Hamilton.
Eleanor had met Edith Hamilton in the spring of 1910. From the moment of her return from Vienna, as she pursued the steps that needed to be taken to create the Hyperion Fund and the other demands of her prescribed life, Eleanor in the back of her mind knew to search for Edith Hamilton, aware of little about the woman other than the name and the fact that later in her life a woman of that name was to write a book about Greek mythology that was to figure prominently later in her story and the story of her family.
Finding this Edith Hamilton seemed crucial in the unfolding of the future she knew was to be, an essential part of her strange and unusual
assignment, and from time to time she would ask friends in Boston if they had ever heard of a woman of that name, an academic and a classicist, Eleanor figured early on. She had asked William James if he knew such an academic, and he said that he did not. And she asked others. No one seemed to know or know of an Edith Hamilton at Harvard or elsewhere.
She had not brought up her search with her former headmistress at Winsor School, Isabel Hewens, one of the great sources of inspiration in her life. Why she didn’t she could not remember. It was in 1909, right around the time of the Clark University conference, that the subject did come up, and Miss Hewens answered quickly, “I think you mean my old friend Edith, who is headmistress of the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore. You must have met her on one of her many visits to me here in Boston.”
“I think I am looking for a classics professor,” Eleanor said.
“Oh, Edith is a classicist, all right. She knows about as much about the ancient world as anyone I know.” She paused and looked at Eleanor with mock umbrage. “Headmistresses can have academic interests, you know.”
Eleanor laughed at her own error. “Of course,” she said apologetically. “Has she written a book about mythology?”
“No,” her old headmistress said, “but I am sure she could. You can ask her the next time she visits.”
So in the early summer of 1910, Eleanor Burden first met Edith Hamilton, the future author of the book that would change many lives and figure prominently in her own. Miss Hamilton was traveling to Maine, where she spent her summers in her family’s house and was staying over at Winsor School on her way from Baltimore, as was her habit.
When Eleanor told William James of the visit, he said, “Oh, I know Edith. I know her family from Philadelphia and Maine. But she is a headmistress. I thought you were searching for an academic.”
“Headmistresses can have academic interests, you know,” Eleanor said, imitating the look of her dear Miss Hewens.
“Of course,” William James said, “I certainly did not mean to imply otherwise.”
Eleanor did indeed meet her old headmistress’s friend and was charmed by the older woman’s command of the ancient world. But she had written no books. “I wouldn’t write about mythology per se,” she told Eleanor. “If I were to write a book, it would be about the Greek way of life. I believe that is my passion.” Miss Hamilton smiled wistfully. “I find that running
a school and ministering to the intellectual and spiritual lives of so many girls takes my full concentration and energy.” Miss Hewens nodded wisely as if to concur. “There is not much left for personal writing,” Miss Hamilton said.
Eleanor smiled but refused to give in. “Well, maybe when you retire.”
Miss Hamilton looked wistful again. Then she paused and gestured to her fellow headmistress, and both women smiled and held a moment of silence, thinking of their responsibilities to young minds.
“Edith,” Isabel Hewens said, “Eleanor wishes you to write a book about mythology, and when Eleanor wishes something she usually gets it. She was remarkably strong and persuasive as a schoolgirl and has continued to be so, if not even more so, as an adult.” Miss Hewens smiled, admiring one of her most prized former students.
When Eleanor told Professor James about the encounter, he threw his head back and laughed. “
A remarkably strong and persuasive schoolgirl,
indeed,” he said with relish. “If you wish it to happen, we all know it will happen.”
Shortly after Arnauld’s arrival that fall, as a beginning teacher at St. Gregory’s School, at dinner at Miss Hewens’s house, Eleanor took great delight in introducing him to Edith, who was returning to Baltimore from her summer sojourn in Maine. “You have much in common,” she said to her friend Edith, in what turned out to be an understatement. And that evening the five of them, she, Edith, Arnauld, Frank, and Isabel Hewens, discussed many matters of ancient history and literature, all with great enthusiasm. Arnauld told of his boyhood rapture when reading Heinrich Schliemann’s account of discovering Troy, and it was Frank who nodded most in agreement. “Do you believe that it really was Priam’s Troy that he found?” Edith asked, adding a touch of skepticism.
“Absolutely authentic,” Arnauld said. “It is such a romantic story that we all will it to be true.”
“That simplifies the matter,” Edith said. “If it is a good story then it must be true.” The she turned to her friend Isabel. “I like this man’s reasoning.”
“I think you have found a match,” Miss Hewens said with a smile to Eleanor a few weeks later. “Edith has already invited your Arnauld up to the family house in Maine, and she does not do that often. It is her time for quiet thought and solitary reflection, she always says. Do you suppose
that those two will ever pause in their reading Greek to each other and sharing Ovid and Pindar and Homer?” And then she added, “And they have begun a catalogue of every myth they encounter, and every mythological character they can recall. I am certain, knowing Edith and your Austrian friend, that it is as thorough a collection as one will find anywhere.”
Eleanor admitted at that time to feeling some relief that this new friendship might serve as a further inducement for Arnauld to remain in America. But now that Arnauld was gone and Eleanor had read and reread Edith’s letter, the immediate and natural affinity that those two lovers of antiquity had shown for each other, that at the time had seemed so amusing, she now found heartbreaking.
My dear Eleanor,
I have just heard the very sad news of Arnauld Esterhazy’s death on the Italian front some months ago. I cannot tell you the devastation this news brings with it. So many young men have perished in this endless and seemingly pointless struggle that it is difficult to single out any one, but somehow Arnauld’s death brings with it a poignancy that is lost in the news of the abundance of others. He was one about whom great words have been and will be written. Losing him is a loss of an epic scale. I know the closeness you felt with this extraordinary and kind man, and I believe that you knew of mine.
It was you who introduced him to me at Isabel Hewens’s home in Boston eight years ago, and I believe that you knew at the time how much the two of us would find in common and how his interests and sensibilities would coincide with my own. Of course, he could read Latin and Greek, and that ability in a man is enough to cause a blush of affection from the start. I suppose it is prejudice to point out that such abilities are rare in men in our country but less rare among Europeans. But there was so much more common interest. I cannot recall the company of male companionship more cherished than when he and I would read Homer or Ovid or Hesiod or Pindar to each other and go over each retelling of mythology with wonder and complete absorption. Of course, we loved reading Chapman’s Homer to each other, but it was the Greek Homer especially that he read so beautifully. And although I never called him on it, I always suspected that he knew the Greek of the
Odyssey
by heart. He could certainly cite many passages from memory. I would listen transfixed.
Having spent long hours with this man in such enterprise, I know well the high regard in which he held you, dear Eleanor. You were indeed his inspiration and his muse, his Beatrice, as he said so many times with reverence. He came to Boston because of you, and it was because of you that he intended to stay. Were any woman desirous of being first in his heart, that would be a futile enterprise, the position already firmly and permanently established by his beloved Beatrice. Of course you know that, but I felt compelled to put it in writing to you now as I sort through the details of my own great sadness.
As I sit now in the presence of this sorrow, I can only tell you that I understand your grief and your loss. We were fortunate beyond recounting to have had this extraordinary man in our lives.
Yours with affection,
Edith
INFLUENZA
T
he future was ruined. There would be no maturing Arnauld Esterhazy at St. Gregory’s School, no legendary Venerable Haze in the lives of the schoolboys. Young Standish, born in 1915 and now approaching four years old, would not become the famous war hero Dilly Burden, would not develop a love for Vienna, would turn out to be a banker like his father, and there would be no Wheeler Burden.
Such anguish she had not felt for twenty years, since those sorrowful days at the end of her time in Vienna. She could no longer trust events to turn out as foretold in the journal she had brought with her from that time. Life as she had grown to accept it was over. All because of a simple telegram.