“It is greatly different from the birth of Vienna,” he said. “And that difference is for a foreigner simply fascinating.” What the Bostonians took for granted, just as the Viennese took for granted the complexities of the empire, this new visitor found boundlessly interesting. And he began to convey to his young students what he could of those interests.
29
ARNAULD AND WILL
When Eleanor finished telling Will Honeycutt what she thought appropriate in this story, she paused and waited for his response. “Well?” she said.
Her disheveled partner gave her a long appraising look. “Thank you for telling me that,” he said flatly. “It is the thoroughness of detail I desire.”
“And that you have deserved. I am sorry that I did not confide in you sooner.” He nodded, and smiled his gratitude. “Now you know that Arnauld is very special to me,” she continued, “and his continued success here, which you have helped to ensure, is of utmost significance.”
“I now know,” he said. “And I am glad for it.”
Eleanor took a deep breath before continuing. “As you have gathered over our time together,” she began, “I have certain instincts about the future, instincts that have been proven right in wonderful and terrible ways, as you know, and by now you may have guessed that it is what I brought back from that extraordinary time in Vienna, including the fact that Arnauld is to play a major role in my future and the future of St. Gregory’s School. I can tell no one, save you. It is comforting to know that I can count on your help.”
“You could always count on my help.”
“You were leaving for New York,” she said in an involuntary and sudden burst. “I was devastated.”
Will Honeycutt hung his head. “I am sorry. I don’t know what to say. It will not happen again.”
“Let us hope not,” she snapped, then she collected herself and smiled at him for a moment.
He looked up and smiled back weakly. “It won’t happen again,” he repeated.
She waited a moment, then nodded, dissolving any tension. “Well, there was one good outcome,” she said. “It made me aware once and for all of how much I depend on you and how I need to take you more into my confidence.”
“And I too have learned from my impetuousness. I will be from now on, you can be assured, worthy of that confidence.”
“We shall drink to that,” she said, raising the crystal glass appropriated from a New York hotel room ten years before, “with this fine expensive claret.”
“That one hopes has not turned to vinegar,” Will said, raising his glass in response, watching her take the first sip. He tasted the wine, paused, and then nodded and smiled.
She sipped again. “Very satisfactory,” she said, and returned his smile. “Like a good partnership, it has survived over time, and is made all the better by age.”
“At first Arnauld found his teaching job at St. Gregory’s demanding and difficult,” Eleanor said to Will the next morning, as they continued their conversation, after she was sure to mention how relieved and happy she was to have her business partner back in place. “I think he found it at first more a curiosity than a calling,” she added. Arnauld had explained to her how his young students had mistaken his Viennese manner as stiffness and arrogance, but gradually, as he became accustomed to their style and they to his, they began to accept him. “But now I think he is on his way to becoming a full-fledged and popular teacher of German and history. The headmaster gives him very good reports.”
“I have enjoyed watching him adjust,” Will offered. “I must admit. And it seems that Frank has also.”
Eleanor’s husband, Frank Burden, the staunch and traditional Boston banker, a few years senior to Arnauld, took a liking to the young Viennese intellectual, and joined in introducing him to his alma mater Harvard College, first to the extensive resources of Widener Library, and then to the single sculls of the Charles River boathouse. Within his first year in Boston, Arnauld became an eager and passionate rower, “a passion that could serve one,” Frank Burden observed, “for the rest of one’s life.”
As Arnauld settled in to enjoying the life of a master at a prestigious Boston school, his letters began to take on an easy elegance, describing the life of a popular teacher and a very eligible bachelor, invited—through the instigation of the very well-connected Eleanor Burden—to the social engagements of the very best families. “I find myself greatly stimulated by the social scene,” he wrote his parents. “Boston is vastly different from Vienna or any other European city, but then again very much the same. I find the brashness of these Americans very refreshing, while not being completely devoid of Continental sophistication.”
Intellectually, he had the resources of Harvard; socially, he had the life of his colleagues; and for exercise he had the Charles River and his newfound passion for rowing, all of which he described in letters with articulate grace. Obviously, he found it a very agreeable life, and one he would have continued gladly forever, had it not been for the awful intrusion of European war.
The rowing had begun in earnest when Frank had introduced Arnauld to the Harvard boathouse in Cambridge. Arnauld had expressed an interest in single sculling, which he had begun briefly while visiting his great and flamboyant friend Miggo in Italy during his university days. Michelangelo Alphonso Sabatini was actually an Esterhazy cousin, the son of one of Arnauld’s Esterhazy aunts who married an Italian count in Genoa. The count’s mother just happened to be an American industrialist’s daughter, so Miggo felt at home in Saratoga, New York, and Genoa and was comfortable in the coffeehouses of Vienna. “He is the son of my father’s sister,” Arnauld would explain with delight. “His grandmother is a Vanderbilt. Miggo is aristocracy in three languages.” To which the effervescent Miggo would respond, “Or scoundrel.”
He had a wonderful panache and likened himself to Theodore Roosevelt and the swashbuckling writer Rafael Sabatini, whom he asserted was a relative, a dubious claim.
“Miggo considers himself more American than Italian,” Arnauld told Eleanor on one of the two occasions when his cousin visited him at St. Gregory’s. “When he is in America. He likes the flamboyant life.” There is evidence in notes and letters that both Eleanor and Frank Burden were impressed by “our young Italo-American,” as Frank called him.
“He thinks of himself as a Rough Rider,” Arnauld said.
It was Miggo who introduced him to rowing, and Frank Burden who saw that he was instructed properly, in the right places, once he heard by way of one of the exuberant Miggo’s visits, that it was an interest, if even a distant one, Frank being a great supporter of all physical exercise. So Arnauld began his career as a Charles River rower, and “one of some little renown,” Frank said.
Will Honeycutt, even before his desertion and return, would take Arnauld down to the boathouse, help him carry the shell and oars to the water, and then watch him settle into the single-seated boat and push himself out onto the river, rowing away in smooth synchronized strokes. But after his conversion, Will performed the service with greater frequency and relish. “I want to encourage you in this endeavor,” he told his new friend. “I think you have a future in it.”
And Arnauld said, “I don’t know about a future, but I do love it greatly.”
And to Eleanor Will said, “Arnauld is a phenomenon. People around here can’t get over it. ‘There are some former college rowers who don’t have the power and smoothness of that man,’ they keep saying.”
“I would like very much to see him rowing,” Eleanor said.
“You can join us at the boathouse someday. You will be impressed.”
And the young Austrian’s punctuality impressed everyone. He would pull away from the dock and exactly forty-five minutes later, “to the second,” observers insisted, he would be back.
“How do you do it?” Will Honeycutt asked. “You carry no timepiece.”
“Internal timing, I suppose,” Arnauld said. “The rowing for me is my deep connection. I l
ose myself in it, like Klimt when he is painting.”
“And yet you arrive back at the boathouse with exactly the same timing, every outing.”
“I am just in a flow, I guess.”
“A flow,” Will Honeycutt said, musing over the word. “I guess you could call it that.”
One day in Arnauld’s first year in Boston, Will told Eleanor at the Hyperion Fund office that that day would be a good day. “He will leave at two,” Will said. “He is always very precise, and he will be back at two forty-five. You can set your watch by it.”
“I will be there,” Eleanor said.
So at a little after two o’clock, Eleanor arranged to be driven to the Harvard boathouse, where she joined Will on the dock, and they both looked downriver toward Boston Harbor. “There,” Will said finally, pointing. “That speck.”
And they both watched as the distant speck turned into the two beating oars of a single-scull rower and then into a form they both could recognize as Arnauld. “Look at how smooth he is,” Will said, “and the power he brings to each stroke. One would never guess all that athletic aesthetic was hidden within our scholarly friend. It is all in the timing, they say.”
They watched in silence as the rower glided between the strong smooth strokes of his double oars, the muscles in his back straining as his seat slid back and his oars dug into the Charles River water, rowing, as was his regular practice, up the river past their position, totally unaware of being watched. Eleanor’s husband, Frank Burden, was a fine strong athlete, but he was a large-framed man, taut and muscular. Arnauld was light in build and subtly muscled, supple more than powerful, not imposing physically, but somehow as he rowed he called up something from the mythic past. And since athletics had played no part in his intellectual past, one would never have expected it. She had prepared herself to be impressed, but still what she saw was for her somehow overpowering.
“Beautiful,” she said with an exhalation. “How does he know how to do it so well?”
“I don’t know. He communicates with some subatomic energy force, I think. It was that way the first moment he sat in a boat, as far as I can tell.”
“He knew rowing from Europe?”
“Not really,” Will Honeycutt said. “He had rowed only a few times in Italy with his cousin Miggo, and here he was inspired to athleticism by America, he says. Here, it became for him a passion.”
Eleanor watched in awed silence as Arnauld’s shell, having stopped and turned and now gliding back toward them, slowed to approach the dock. She was unable to suppress her smile of wonder.
It had always seemed to her peculiar, and a bit unfair, that athletics were the province of men, and when women were allowed to engage in sport they had to do so with the encumbrance of long dresses. There were those among her Smith College friends, even in her time there in the 1890s, who predicted a forthcoming surge of women’s rights, beginning with the right to vote and evolving to the right to play tennis in pants, like men, or to swim in something brief and less obtrusive. Both men and women covered their bodies when they played sports and swam, the exceptions being track and rowing, “where the contestants are next to naked,” another of her sophisticated Smith friends observed with a knowing smile.
Back in those Smith College days, Eleanor had seen the man who was to be her husband “virtually naked,” as her roommate at Smith said, because he had trained in track at Harvard and was planning to throw the discus at the newly invented Olympic Games in Athens in the summer of 1896, her graduation year. “You must admit,” her roommate said, “it causes a certain arousal to see so much of the male physique,” and Eleanor did have to admit that Frank Burden was a very handsome man fully clothed or in the short pants and bare shoulders of his track jersey.
But of all the scanty uniforms of athletics, the scantiest were those of the rowers. And scantiness of uniform was the main reason, other than the demand for raw strength in the pulling of the oars, that women would never be allowed to row crew. “Just as they could never throw the discus,” Frank Burden said. “There is simply too much demand for raw muscle power.”
Had she not received reports from both her husband and her partner, Will Honeycutt, she never would have guessed that Arnauld Esterhazy was athletic. The picture of Arnauld clad in a team uniform coming sweaty and muddied off an athletic field, as she had seen Frank Burden do so many times in his boyhood and early adulthood, would simply not form in her mind. That is why the scene of his rowing toward her on the dock, his muscles straining at the oars, and then lifting himself out of the single-seated shell, the smooth roundness of his bare shoulders and the sinews of his legs plainly in view, sweat droplets on his brow, made the powerful impression it did.
As he pulled his oars in and reached out with a hand to the dock, he looked up for the first time.
“I brought a surprise observer,” Will said. “She wanted to see how it is done, firsthand.”
Pulling himself back from wherever he had been, startled by the vision before him, the surprised rower gave his observer a tentative smile, as if uncomfortable with having been observed, and then his face broke into a huge grin. And then he blushed.
Suddenly there he stood beside her, nearly naked, looking so very much like a Roman marble that she found herself overcome in that moment in what her Smith College roommate would have called a state of “arousal,” unable to think clearly or to speak, even if the exhilarated rower had found the presence of mind in that moment to say something of substance, which he did not.
“I am honored that you came,” Arnauld said.
“That was beautiful, Arnauld,” she heard herself saying, and he looked up. “It is absolutely beautiful, Arnauld,” Eleanor repeated. “You have the grace of the gods out there.” Not accustomed to such flattery, from such a source, Arnauld only looked down.
Will helped him lift the shell out of the water and carry it toward the boathouse. “You can bring the oars,” he said to Eleanor. And she followed behind, carrying the oars into the boathouse, her face still flushed with wonder, still relishing the memory of what she had seen out on the water, now barely able to keep her eyes off the half-naked man only a few paces from her. It was a moment, she recalled later, when things changed, a moment that made enough of an impression on her at the time that she mentioned it in a letter to her friend Jung. “It is truly sublime,” she wrote. “I found myself transfixed. I don’t fully understand. It is as if this quiet, unassuming, and gentle man has transcended himself and made contact with some rich mythic past, a study in grace.”
Arnauld did not yet feel anything like grace at St. Gregory’s. The teaching did not come as naturally for him as the rowing suddenly did, especially not the teaching of American thirteen-year-old boys. “Teaching German to the older boys is more what I am accustomed to. I fear that I bore the younger ones,” he told Eleanor. “They are not as interested as I am.”
“They are more interested than you think,” Eleanor said with a reassuring smile. “I hear good reports.”
“But they are full of energy. In Vienna, we were taught to respect our teachers and to sit quietly and observe, on pain of corporal punishments. We saved our rambunctiousness for outside of class. Here it seems to be quite the opposite. The boys are forever erupting in class, and outside they are quite sedate and respectful.”
“They respect you. I know that.”
“I think they wish to help me teach. Where I come from that would be preposterous.”
And not wishing to bore his students, he learned slowly how to modulate his passions. Arnauld Esterhazy and the St. Gregory’s boys took some time to get to know one another, it was said, but once they did it would be, as Will Honeycutt predicted, “smooth sailing.”
“Do not worry,” Eleanor said with a great and unusual confidence. “They will come around. You will become very successful. I know that in my bones.”
“You sound very certain,” Arnauld said.
“Oh, I am certain, Arnauld,” Eleanor said.
“There is nothing about which I am more confident.” And that confidence from her did much to give Arnauld reassurance in moving forward.
Eleanor could not fully account for her feeling of confidence. Some of it came from what she knew of the future, her sense of destiny, but some of it came from the simple fact that she had loved being in Arnauld’s company from the beginning, even back in Vienna, when he was eighteen. It began as simple enjoyment and evolved over the years into something deeper. “He has knowledge,” William James had said to her upon hearing her descriptions of the young man from her past she was planning to bring to Boston. “Knowledge is great power, and greatly compelling.”
When William James was himself a young man, he had accompanied the famous professor Louis Agassiz to the Amazon. “Professor Agassiz knew the names of every species on earth, or so it seemed. Accompanying him into the wilds of the Amazon was a wondrous experience. ‘Knowledge is the greatest of aphrodisiacs,’ he used to say, ‘when applied discreetly.’”
Eleanor smiled and agreed and thought back on how much her young friend had grown on her during their time together in his Vienna, and how greatly she was looking forward to his arrival in Boston all these years later. “Arnauld’s applications are always discreet,” she said, reflecting on how even though getting Arnauld to come to Boston was her very demanding assignment, certainly not without anxious moments, the anticipation of his arrival and its actually coming to pass now caused her heart to soar. “He is quite shy, actually, a very compelling quality.”
“It sounds as if you will enjoy very much his presence here,” William James observed on hearing of her plans to bring about his appointment at St. Gregory’s.
“You too will enjoy his company,” she said then to Dr. James. And later it always seemed sadly ironic that the great professor had died just as Arnauld was making his entry into Boston and St. Gregory’s. “He carries the history of European culture in his head,” Eleanor had said once to her great mentor.
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