Of course, William James knew the whole story eventually, but that was at the very end, when it became clear that he would not be able to meet this man who was to play such a very important role in her life. The great professor left, and the young teacher arrived. Grief that settled upon her at the one loss was ameliorated by the pleasure she took in watching her friend from the past adjust to his new role as visitor in a strange land.
During Arnauld’s frequent evenings at the Burden house on Acorn Street, Eleanor would grin inwardly with pleasure whenever she saw him in conversation with one of her friends. “His knowledge of things cultural is exquisite,” the rector of Trinity Church said to her one evening before the symphony. “He could do a whole treatise on the difference between Brahms and Haydn.”
“Or Poussin and David,” the wife of one of Frank’s partners, who was listening in, contributed.
“Or Flaubert and George Sand,” offered a third observer, the rector’s wife, a woman Eleanor had known since childhood. “And he does so with such eloquence, with that wonderful accent of his,” she added, with a smile of obvious relish. “And he carries himself with such a princely bearing.”
Such observations would always bring a proud smile to Eleanor’s lips, since Arnauld’s recruitment had been her idea, and hers alone. “Young Esterhazy is settling in. I think he just might be here for the long haul,” the headmaster said to her, then admitted to a feeling of great satisfaction in the success, as did everyone else at St. Gregory’s. “He is very amiable, you know,” the headmaster concluded. “Those of us in the school business are quite taken by amiability.” By Eleanor’s lights, everything had arrived at a very agreeable status.
But all of this was before her moment of “arousal” on the Harvard College boathouse dock when she saw the near-naked elegance of the rowing for the first time, that moment that changed everything, especially considering what she knew was to come.
“And how are you enjoying your new life in Boston?” she asked Arnauld one evening soon after, before a gala for the Museum of Fine Arts, to which she had secured Arnauld an invitation.
“I am liking it very much,” Arnauld said, a little too quickly and glibly for Eleanor’s purposes.
She pressed him. “No, I mean really. I do wish to know.”
With this, Arnauld paused and gave the question consideration. “Really,” he said. “I find much to amuse myself, and I am adjusting to teaching. I find myself each evening wondering how I might present my lessons more effectively tomorrow. I find myself watching the older teachers with admiration and a certain envy. And, of course, I enjoy very much also my evenings like this away from school in your salon, and my life in Cambridge. They have much in common with my former life in Vienna.” And he did not add, although he must have been tempted, and everything is so very American.
She pressed again. “And for the future?”
“As for the future,” Arnauld said, “we shall see.”
And in a rare moment of candor she found herself confiding, “I want so for you to be happy here, Arnauld. And I worry.”
And returning the rare candor, Arnauld looked into her face and saw the worry. “I do not wish to cause you concern. Being beside you means the world to me. You know that I will do whatever is necessary to continue being there.”
And then Eleanor caught herself. “Well,” she said. “We shall just have to work all the harder to make sure that you are totally entertained.” And she smiled and patted his arm before leading him away toward the others in their party.
During this whole time, Eleanor depended heavily on Will Honeycutt as a factor in the entertainment of Arnauld, and from the beginning she marveled at the way the two men found mutual attraction.
“We argue,” Will said to her one day, with a great smile. “Each thinks of the other as his equal.”
“In your case,” Eleanor said, “that is saying something. And what do you argue about?”
“Descartes and the Enlightenment,” Will said. “The validity of psychology as a science. You know, grand ideas like that.”
“I would love to listen in.”
“Oh,” Will said with a smile, “I fear we generated more heat than light. But we both enjoy the exchange. Arnauld is such a respectful man, I think he enjoys our moments of irreverence.”
“You serve as a good provocateur,” she said with a smile, thinking of those two minds ranging over the course of European philosophy, Arnauld the devout classicist and Will Honeycutt the upstart American scientist, an introvert and an extrovert, her friend Jung would point out, each fully able to keep up with the other.
It was at Eleanor’s instigation that Will first invited the young Viennese to visit Cambridge with him. “He will appreciate getting to know the Harvard you know,” Eleanor said, always thinking of how to make Arnauld’s new American life more compelling. “And it would mean a great deal to me. Cambridge will remind him of his university days in Vienna perhaps. He will feel very much at home.” And so he did, so much so that he solicited further invitations, and soon the two new friends made regular visits to Cambridge a part of life. The two young men grew accustomed to sitting in cafés and walking along the Charles.
“Arnauld is exceedingly good company,” Will reported back, “although a little idealistic.”
“And what would he say about that?” Eleanor asked, amused.
“Oh, he might say that I am a bit obstreperous.” Then he paused and laughed, “We balance each other well, actually, the poet and the iconoclast.”
And Arnauld reported in his own way how he liked very much Will’s common sense and practical manner. “An American pragmatist,” he said. “I find him refreshing. He would liven up our coffeehouse discussions back in Vienna, that is for sure.”
“And not too abrasively?” Eleanor asked.
“Oh my, no,” Arnauld said. “It is good for us stuffy Europeans to get a taste of true practicality.”
It was clear to Eleanor after a time that the two men had become quite fond of each other and fond of their “discursives,” as they called them, those “discursives” accounting for the difference in tone. If there was any discussion between the two men of a certain deep and unsatisfied emotion that they had in common, it was never mentioned to Eleanor, to her great relief.
Then the horrible unrest in Europe intruded. For months, the two friends Arnauld and Will Honeycutt would talk and argue about the rivalries of the various European countries.
“An unhealthy tension,” Will Honeycutt would say, pointing a finger at the German kaiser, as if the kaiser’s very demeanor were Arnauld’s responsibility.
“Business as usual,” Arnauld would counter, “just saber rattling. Nothing out of the ordinary. The German people are actually very peaceful, but the kaiser and the generals are like peacocks parading in their uniforms, taking themselves too seriously. They have built up a war machine, but I think they and the French will hold each other at bay.”
“One hears that the kaiser is a belligerent bully,” Will said, trying to get a rise out of his friend.
Arnauld grimaced. “It is difficult to think of fate in the hands of such a character, is it not? He was a Hapsburg cousin, and Prince Rudolf couldn’t stand him. It is said that the dread of seeing this artless, graceless cousin succeeding was one of the despairs that drove him to his act at Mayerling.”
“Let’s hope that he calms himself down,” Will said.
“Let us hope,” Arnauld repeated.
“It doesn’t look very good to me.”
“Nor to me,” Arnauld finally admitted.
30
JUST THIS ONCE
Each summer, Arnauld would travel home to Austria, as was perfectly natural. Often during these summers some Boston families would schedule visits to see him in Vienna on their European tours. He returned the favor of their hospitality in Boston, with introduction to café life and to the theater and the opera, always saying how much he was looking forward to his return at sum
mer’s end to his life at St. Gregory’s and Boston.
Each time she would hear from one of the returning families, Eleanor would smile inwardly and marvel at how, in spite of the ups and downs, things had worked out exactly as they should have, all the time aware of the coming war and Arnauld Esterhazy’s fateful role in it.
So Arnauld’s decision to leave Boston for Vienna in the summer of 1914 was nothing unusual or dramatic, and nothing to do with the international tension in Europe. He had left each of the three previous summers during his time teaching at St. Gregory’s, and this time he had even asked Will Honeycutt to join him for part of the summer, which Will initially agreed to until at the last minute demands of the Hyperion Fund intruded. “Next summer then,” Arnauld said with confidence. But that was in April. By the June departure date, he had lost some of that confidence.
“You will be sailing into a hornet’s nest, my friend,” Will Honeycutt said.
“I tend to agree with you,” Arnauld said, adding, “This time it is my premonition.”
“You are sounding downright fatalistic,” Will said. “Not unlike your host, Mrs. Burden.”
“She is indeed somewhat fatalistic,” Arnauld reflected. “It is as if she knows something of the future that we do not.” Will Honeycutt did not respond.
He would sail for Europe shortly after classes ended for the spring term, spend the summer in Vienna and with his parents at their nearby vineyard, and then return in time for the opening of school in early September. But this time, with the palpable tension that seemed to have spread throughout Europe, at least a few people were apprehensive. “What if you got over there and couldn’t get back?” one friend on the St. Gregory’s faculty said.
But Arnauld always dismissed the concern with what had become for him a quick and always good-natured retort, “Oh, I don’t think German belligerence is all it is made out to be.”
“And what of Austria’s tensions with Serbia?” his knowledgeable friend responded. And that too Arnauld dismissed as overreaction. He would sail in mid-June and be “back in time for football season,” he said with a good deal of amusement, as American football seemed to him the most curious of national passions, one he greatly enjoyed nonetheless. “If I were to be reborn,” he announced after his second fall at St. Gregory’s, “I would want to be an American football hero.”
Eleanor Burden had made a point of increasing his invitations to Acorn Street as his departure date approached. From the moment of his coming to Boston to teach, he had loved his time at the Burden home; in fact, he had written home to his parents on a number of occasions describing exactly his impression of the warm and cultured reception he found there.
Eleanor Burden is the most beautiful hostess, elegant and receptive, always poised and ever willing to lead discussions on French painting, Italian cuisine, voting rights for women, transcendentalism, or any of a number of interesting topics. She manages her family with an efficient grace and warmth. Her daughters are delicately well mannered and yet full of life. Her husband, Frank Burden, a serious and formal banker, a bit stiff and gruff perhaps outside the home, warms to her attentions and is also a splendid and welcoming host. It is he, by the way, who has encouraged my rowing on the Charles River, the single scull to which I have become so attentively fixed. But it is Eleanor Burden herself who fills my life here in Boston with positive energy. The thought of being in her presence anywhere in this city is for me the pleasure that sustains me during my week of teaching, and the actuality of being in her home is a pleasure complete enough to sustain thoughts of living in Boston for a long time.
To his old friend Alma, recently widowed by the tragic death of Gustav Mahler in 1911, knowing her interest in intrigues of the heart, he wrote something even more emotionally specific:
Only to you would I ever admit such a thing, but I absolutely worship the ground she walks on. I see her in her daily life, so full of organizational poise and confidence, and I come away each time newly inspired. She is a social leader in Boston, for sure. Everyone at the school thinks the world of her. She is a kind and dedicated parent of her two girls. And in the evenings at her beautiful home, she is so serene and gracious that one would think she had not a care or responsibility in the world, knowing full well that quite the opposite is true. She is indeed the vision of loveliness of my dreams.
So it was that Arnauld had become accustomed to spending occasional evenings in her home and staying the night in the guest room on Acorn Street instead of being driven home late. His last night in Boston that June would be no different. He would spend it in the Burden home on the eve of his train trip to New York City and the steamship from Hoboken, New Jersey, to Bremen, Germany, the next day. “We will send you off in good fashion so you will remember to return,” Eleanor said lightly in offering the invitation.
“Oh, I shall always remember to return,” Arnauld replied, with an assurance that betrayed the rather desperate feelings he would encounter on occasion when thinking of somehow losing her presence in his life.
“You mustn’t be so serious,” Eleanor said this time on the eve of this parting. “You will never lose us, Arnauld.” And as always when she talked of the future, he noticed something very firm and reassuring in her voice.
“You always sound so confident when talking of things to come,” he said.
She knew what had to be done and had begun planning weeks in advance, carrying out her tasks with her usual thoroughness, making certain that the girls were spending the night away and that Frank would seize an opportunity to be in New York, even noticing in the cycle of her own biology that her body would be perfectly ready. Then just as the final pieces of her planning all fell into place, Arnauld discovered that due to unexpected repairs necessary to his steamer his departure date was to be postponed a week, and the whole business seemed to go disastrously awry, causing her to fall into a secret despair she knew well from so many times before.
And then, by some miracle, Arnauld received word that, the repairs made, his sailing date had been moved back to its original time, and as had happened also so many times before, everything fell miraculously into place. On that early summer night of 1914, she carried out the final details of her assignment with a careful sense of ritual, like a temple priestess, she told herself. But she did not realize in advance the intensity with which the experience would catch her by total surprise and leave her filled with desire and longing, and, four years later, unspeakable grief.
That fateful night of Arnauld’s departure in 1914, she knew at least part of the story. She knew that calamity awaited him in what looked to others like a harmless return to Vienna for his summer vacation, and she knew of the coming outbreak of war in Europe and Arnauld’s entanglement in it. She alone had foreknowledge of, and could do nothing to prevent, what was to be the forthcoming world conflagration, an all-consuming world war that would destroy a whole generation, and she knew that somehow—she knew not how—Arnauld would be swept up by it with devastating consequences. That knowledge weighed heavily on her as she prepared for his departure.
But she also knew the outcome and knew that somehow Arnauld would survive, return to Boston, and play a major role in the life of St. Gregory’s and her family. In fact, she had absolute faith at this time that Arnauld, the man with whom she was destined to share the deepest of connections, no matter what he would endure in war, would emerge safely and to renew his life as a legendary teacher there.
As so many times before she knew what destiny would dictate, but she knew also that she had to act. It was once again that strange dance of her life, between the predestined and free will, between knowing what would happen in the future and knowing what she had to do to make it happen. So she knew well in advance exactly what outcome she was obligated to orchestrate on that evening in June 1914, on the eve of Arnauld’s departure.
He arrived with his bags that evening and laid out his tickets and travel papers on the bed to assure himself that he had everything in order. He
would leave directly from the Burdens’ home on Beacon Hill to the Back Bay train station in the morning.
“Reports are that it is not easy crossing borders these days,” he said to Eleanor. “Every country seems to be suspicious of its neighbor.”
“Luckily, you will be crossing directly into Austria-Hungary. That is a relief, I suppose. At least the nations of the empire are friendly.”
“So far it seems so,” he said with a smile. “Although one can never tell with the Czechs.” Czechoslovakia lay between his arrival point in Bremen and his destination in Vienna.
It was not until after he had arrived on Acorn Street in the late afternoon and was preparing for the cocktail hour before dinner that he realized that Frank Burden was away on business, the girls were spending the night with a Putnam cousin in Cambridge, and Rose Spurgeon and the cook had been given the evening off. At first, he thought that Will Honeycutt might be joining them for dinner, but that too turned out not to be the case.
“Tonight, I have you all to myself,” Eleanor said, and Arnauld admitted to a rush of euphoria at the thought. Being alone with this woman who had sustained his definition of feminine perfection for almost twenty years was an elation like no other he could imagine. After all this time, he could think of no greater pleasure than sitting with her and her other guests in the Acorn Street living room—where William and Henry James had sat years before, during her parents’ time. He doubted that Eleanor, with all her elegant detachment, had any idea how much she actually meant to him.
“I am glad for it,” was all he said, and then offered, “We have much of my travels to review,” as an attempt to mask his true feelings.
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