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 sai
d 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
37
INFLUENZA
The 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.
What a fool she had been to believe the preposterousness of the journal’s preordination anyway. Granted, over the twenty years there had been events and details she had known of in advance: the incredible investments, tasks she needed to perform, the tragedy of the Titanic, in all of which she had had no choice or control, and all of which she had been able to tell no one. But now everything had come to an end, with this one death in war, in the midst of so many deaths in war.
That was when Eleanor was revisited by the dream, “The Big Dream,” Carl Jung had called it some years before when she first wrote to him of it. It came to her again, leaving her suddenly awake in the cold sweat of panic. In the dream that first night, she found herself perched on the top of a huge iceberg, in the middle of a glassy sea. She sat precariously, fearful that she would slide off. Below her, at the waterline, she could see a large long swath of red paint, and below that she was aware of the huge mass extending far below into the deep. The depth of ocean beneath her, thousands of feet, gave her an even greater feeling of dread. As she began to slide, desperately digging in with her heels and fingernails, she always woke up, sweating and gasping for breath.
She was barely holding on, barely holding herself together, barely coping with this unpredictable and undeniable turn of events. She went about her life on Acorn Street without animation, like a ghost. She could tell no one of her immense shock, and no one except Rose Spurgeon, who had just lost her husband in the early throes of what was to become a terrible pandemic, seemed to notice. “What is the matter, ma’am?” Rose asked, she who herself had just lost so grievously. “You aren’t getting sick, are you?”
“Nothing, Rose. I seem to have a touch of something, that’s all. Nothing to worry about.”
And then Susan became ill.
For twenty years, Eleanor’s faith had been tested, for sure, but always affirmed in the end. What was supposed to happen somehow always happened, but now this fateful turn. She had believed from reading the journal that she and her family would be spared, but now with Arnauld dead, killed in the war, anything was possible. The future was wide open.
That the news of his death had come at the time of the dreaded influenza, with Boston one of the most severely affected of American cities, only added to Eleanor’s consternation. The epidemic had begun on an army base in Kansas, in the spring of 1918, generated suddenly, it was conjectured, from the widespread burning of pig manure, and emanated to other army bases throughout the country. A dark unnatural cloud settled on the area, it was remembered, and then the sicknesses began. American soldiers carried the pestilence to Europe, where it spread and grew in virulence, then came back with a vengeance, spreading quickly to army bases, Camp Devens near Boston being one of the hardest hit. It was not long before the dreadful pestilence distributed itself in the civilian populations, especially in the big cities of the East Coast, attacking—uncharacteristic of flus in general—the youngest and healthiest, giving it more the appearance of plague than flu.
Wherever it arrived, hospitals and clinics were overwhelmed, medical staffs—already depleted by war service in Europe—were stretched to the breaking point, and emergency tents were set up to care for the affected. Flu victims were encouraged to move to large makeshift infirmaries, for reasons of both treatment and quarantine, lying in hallways, waiting for the dying to relinquish their beds. There were so many deaths, such inevitability, that nurses actually wrapped patients in sheets and affixed toe tags even before they died.
Eventually, in the span of less than a year, the influenza would kill some five hundred thousand Americans. The pandemic spread just as the country had decided to join the conflict in Europe. It was President Wilson’s decision to put thousands of soldiers together in the tight quarters of troopships. The disease spread among them and then to soldiers on both sides in the European theater, war and microbes being in collusion.
The American influenza led eventually to fifty million deaths worldwide, becoming a major part of the casualties for both sides in the war. It was the worst epidemic in American history, and the most demoralizing because of its attack on the most vigorous and robust. As their lungs filled with fluid, influenza victims simply drowned. In October 1918, when American soldiers were fully invested in joining the fight and making their impact in the European war, the death toll hit its peak.
There were peculiarities. For some reason, the epidemic, probably begun in Kansas, bore the name Spanish Flu, most likely, because Spain, not at war, did not censor its press and was the only nation to admit up front the pervasive devastation of the illness. In the late fall and winter of 1918 and 1919, only months after its most devastating entry, about the time of the great armistice, the impact waned dramatically.
“The flu ran out of vulnerable victims,” said Tom Ballantine, the Burdens’ longtime Boston doctor. “We had no idea how it got here or how to stop it. It just arrived, killed off everyone it could, then moved on.” It seemed to be over as quickly as it had arrived. But not before it entered the sanctuary of the Burdens’ Acorn Street home.
It was Tom Spurgeon who became sick first. One afternoon he complained of pain in his abdomen and by nightfall he was in bed in the Spurgeons’ quarters off the kitchen. By the next day, he had become unable to move and Eleanor called Tom Ballantine, who had already become alarmed by cases he had seen around the city. He only shook his head when he told Rose what he had found, and a day later Tom was struggling with his breathing and high fever, and he died.
The family had hardly had time to grieve or plan the service when Susan came down with the symptoms, and Tom Ballantine found himself again called to the Burden house, and again shaking his head. Rose did not falter. “You go be with your family,” Eleanor had said to Rose after Tom’s funeral, when the dreaded illness paid its second visit to Acorn.
“I shall stay. I shall be the one to sit with her,” Rose said. “I am already exposed.” Eleanor was impressed then, as she would be many times, by the strength the woman received from her Catholic faith.
Against Tom Ballantine’s advice, Rose and Eleanor took turns beside Susan in the child’s bedroom, administering to her needs as the young girl began burning up with fever. The family became frantic with worry, and Rose Spurgeon argued with her mistress: “Let me stay beside her,” she said. “You take care of the others.”
But Eleanor would have none of it. She took up her place beside Susan’s bed. “I will sit with my daughter,” she said with that fierce conviction of hers that no one in the household would argue with, not even the staunch Frank Burden.
Even in their neighborhood there were cases of children dying from the dreaded flu. The wife of a colle
ague of Frank’s at the bank, another Smith College alumna, was one of the first in their circle of acquaintances to contract the disease and succumb to it, she the mother of three young children. The milkman who had included the Acorn Street house on his morning route for more than twenty years did not show up one morning, and a few days later they heard that he too was dead. One young mother in their neighborhood had heard of the cautions being spread about and had pronounced boldly that she did not intend to “live in fear,” took her infant daughter out onto the Boston streets in her baby carriage with no protective mask, and had lost her within two days.
Eleanor knew of the terrible impact of the loss of a child from sharing grief with Alma Mahler, Arnauld’s childhood friend in Vienna, whom she had befriended when the famous musician came to New York in 1907. Just before their departure for America back then, the Mahlers’ five-year-old daughter, Maria, had died painfully of diphtheria. It was an agonizing experience for both Alma and Gustav, one that neither of them ever got over and that caused Gustav to write some of his most haunting and poignant music. Now the specter of childhood death was at the Burdens’ door.
The wise and kindly Tom Ballantine came and shook his head. “It has gone to her lungs,” he said with solemnity, and everyone knew what that meant. They made the decision to keep Susan at home, knowing full well the consequences, the risks of infection to the whole family.
Frank Burden, hero of countless athletic contests, including the first modern Olympics of 1896, extensive European traveler, international businessman of youthful promise, who had spent a lifetime perfecting a banker’s steely persona, hiding from the surface all the emotions of the weaker sex, was adamant. “You tend to Susan,” he said, affirming his wife’s decision to stay with her daughter. “The rest of us will fend as we must. You give Susan what she needs.”
The Lost Prince Page 27
