“But he is alive,” Herr Esterhazy said. “That is the miracle.”
They talked quietly about how Eleanor and her companion Herr Jodl had searched through the war zone, and the parents had many questions. “Did you know,” Frau Esterhazy said, “when you were with us?”
“I knew that I had to search for him,” Eleanor said.
“By what inspiration?” Herr Esterhazy said with a look of profound puzzlement. “The rest of us accepted the reports.”
“I know it is difficult,” Eleanor said, “and I didn’t wish to give you false hope. But somehow I just knew.”
“Was it because of the boy?” Arnauld’s mother said. “Was it because of your young Standish?”
Eleanor smiled at her, not missing the full depth of implication in the question. “How do you mean?”
“Was it because of your son that you wished that Arnauld be alive?”
“Yes,” Eleanor said, considering the question. “Yes, I suppose it was.”
“Well,” said the father, reaching out with his hand and touching Eleanor’s for just an instant. “We are overwhelmed with gratitude for what you did.” He looked into her eyes. “You alone.”
Eleanor paused for a moment to acknowledge the father’s sentiment. “Our sole purpose now,” she said finally, “is to make him well again.”
“You believe it is possible?” the mother asked with a look of deep concern. Obviously, Jodl had given them a frank description of their son’s condition. “It is almost too much.”
Eleanor smiled again and nodded. “Yes,” she said gently. “I do believe. And he is in extraordinary hands with Dr. Jung.”
Eleanor walked with the parents to the door of Arnauld’s room, as a white-coated doctor opened it and ushered them in. For a moment, the parents kept their distance and looked stunned, not moving, not daring to accept what they were seeing in this shell of a man sitting in pajamas at the edge of his bed. Eleanor could feel the tension from the unspoken fear that all of them carried but did not acknowledge: that this might be a horrible and cruel mistake. Without breathing, she watched the faces of the two parents, in that moment thinking, What if they recoil with “This is not our son”? Time stopped.
Then the mother stepped forward toward the man who looked vacantly and straight ahead, with no sign of recognition in his blank stare. For a moment she scrutinized the empty stare. Then she spoke in no more than a whisper.
The father came forward and stood close to his wife. “Arnauld,” the mother said, and hesitated before laying the back of her hand gently on his cheek. “My son.”
The sitting man did not move. He looked up in the direction of the voice, and it would not be exaggeration to say that he gave no sign.
60
THE MISSING PIECE
It was late afternoon when they were together at the Burghölzli. Frau Esterhazy approached Eleanor and asked if there was a place where they could be alone, and the two of them walked together to a small garden area out a side door. They sat on a small bench, and Frau Esterhazy spoke. “When I thought we had lost our son, I wrote you that letter. I thought you needed to know Arnauld’s extraordinary origins.”
“You were kind to include me,” Eleanor said. “I found the revelations very powerful. They are for me most assuredly the missing piece.”
“We thought our son was dead.” Her voice faltered, and Frau Esterhazy paused to collect herself. “You were vitally important to him. We thought that at the very least you should know.”
“And now that he has been found, do you wish you had not written the letter?”
“No one knows,” the mother said. “It must remain that way. But I am not sorry that I wrote it all to you.”
“I understand.”
“At the time of his birth, we thought it a necessity. For his safety. The baby was being searched for. You understand.”
“Yes, I understand. The situation was very precarious.”
“Now—”
“Now you wish his secret to remain secret.” Frau Esterhazy nodded silently. “You think it sacred information.” The mother nodded silently again. Eleanor waited until the older woman’s eyes rose to meet hers. “I know of that sacredness, and I will share what I know with no one. You can trust that.”
Arnauld Esterhazy’s mother nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “I suspected that I did not need to mention it now, or later. Herr Esterhazy and I know that our son will never be the same again, but still we are happy to have him alive.”
“I believe that he will return in all ways.”
“You have strong faith, Frau Burden. That has brought you here in the first place, and we are grateful beyond words for it. Now that faith tells you that he can be brought all the way back.”
“It does,” Eleanor said.
“We do not have your faith perhaps, but we are still happy that he is alive.”
“There is more—” Eleanor began, and stopped. “There is something you can share with me now. When you told me, back when you thought Arnauld lost, did you have a reason?”
“I think you know the reason,” the mother said.
“It was because of Standish? Because of my son?” Again, Frau Esterhazy said nothing, only nodded with the slightest movement of her head. “Arnauld is to be very important in my son’s life. I know that to be true.”
“I hope that is to be true.”
“It is,” Eleanor said. “It absolutely is.”
“We shall cling to that hope then,” Arnauld’s mother said with a profound sincerity. “We shall cling to your faith.” Then she went quiet, lost in thought for a long moment. “Your son,” she said. “Your Standish. He reminds me so—”
“Arnauld will return to Boston. I just know that. He will be the great teacher of my son and others.”
A gentle calm had come into Frau Esterhazy’s face. “We can all wish for that,” she said. “It is something to hope for.”
And as the two women sat quietly together in the garden of the Zurich hospital, Eleanor could not help reconstructing in her mind the remarkable letter from Frau Esterhazy that explained so much, and would remain a secret between them.
My sister, Madeleine Arnauld, and I were raised in Vienna, by artistic parents, I think you would say. Our father was Viennese and our mother French. Our home was very cultured, and my sister and I studied music with great seriousness. I pursued the study of opera, while my sister chose the theater. Madeleine was very outgoing, and I was the quiet one. She was also very beautiful, which brought her much attention and success, but in the end caused more trouble than good, I fear. But that beauty and her skills as an actress did serve to earn her a prestigious position in the Hofburgtheater. In the meantime, I pursued music and ended up in the fascinating world of the Paris opera.
Madeleine Arnauld became a name quite well-known in Vienna, as a young actress and a colleague of the famous Katharina Schratt, consort to the emperor. I pursued my opera career and met Herr Esterhazy, Emil, who was an artist of some ability but also a history student and an aspiring opera librettist, convinced that he could write the definitive opera of the French Revolution. We fell very much in love and lived a life of some romantic Bohemian appeal, not unlike the characters in Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, discovered by Puccini. We would have been good material for an opera ourselves, Emil always said.
My sister’s life was very different from mine. She had found a home in the pension of a family named Tatlock, a humble one, but her theater life was very grand, I think you would say, with a great deal of money passing from hand to hand. In those days, the Hofburgtheater was popular in the court, and I fear that my sister had much opportunity to consort with aristocrats of name. She became swept up in the high life there, being, as I said, very beautiful, and very lively. She caught the eye of many of the nobility and eventually the crown prince Rudolf himself, who, although married and with children, had quite a nightlife. Soon, it became generally known, she and the crown prince spent time
together. And then she discovered that she was pregnant.
At this point, the crown prince disappeared from her life and the representatives of the court interceded. My sister became an outcast and lost her position in the Hofburgtheater, and she even feared for her own safety, and the safety of the unborn baby.
In the meantime, Emil and I had decided to marry, he a starving artist from an aristocratic family, and I a promising soprano with a chorus position in the opera. Madeleine moved to Paris and Emil became concerned that she needed to disappear. He prevailed on his family to make discreet arrangements so that she could move in all secrecy to Paris to have the baby, all of us fearing what the officials of the court would do when the baby was born. The Esterhazys, by the way, are very good at secrecy. Only they and Fräulein Tatlock knew of her whereabouts.
The pregnancy went well, but the delivery was problematic, and, after a long tortured labor, my sister hemorrhaged and died, leaving a healthy son behind. It was without question the saddest and most joyous event in my life.
I was with my sister during the labor and when the trouble began and she was near death, and I pledged to care for the baby and to guard with my honor and my life the secret of the child’s identity. Emil, with the help of his powerful family, saw to it that the report was spread that both mother and child had not survived. And, having exhausted our desire to live the life of artists, we decided to return to Vienna, where Emil could take up the position he has held all these years at the family vineyard recently made vacant by the death of his father’s cousin.
So we returned to Vienna and moved to the family estate with our adopted baby, everyone, including the court officials, accepting the fact that my sister’s baby had died tragically with her at the birth and that the birth of our own baby boy had been the natural outcome of the artist’s life in Paris.
We named him as our own, and all of us who knew agreed to keep the details of his conception and birth in the deepest secrecy, not knowing what the court would do with the true story. I think you can see our reasoning. There were always rumors in Vienna that a secret imperial son had been born, as there were always rumors of a search for the fabled lost prince.
With the suicide death of the crown prince at Mayerling in 1889, a devastation from which the empire would never recover, and the line of succession very much in question and doubt, we feared even more the possible discovery, and did not want known the details of my dear dead sister’s pregnancy and the identity of our dear son, Arnauld.
We and the Esterhazys, with all their traditions and power, kept the whole story as the darkest of secrets. And we never told our son.
The boy, our son, Arnauld, was heir to the Hapsburg throne, the empire’s lost prince.
61
A Less-Than-Sanguine Report
And indeed, with Arnauld now safely in the care of Dr. Jung and the Burghölzli, his parents informed of his return from the dead, and there being no more she could do, Eleanor knew that it was safe to return to Boston. Sometime after her return, she received this letter.
My dearest Eleanor,
I am sorry to offer here this less-than-sanguine report on Arnauld. Since we both concluded that his recovery would take the better part of a year, we should, I suppose, be encouraged by his progress over these months. Although he is not ready to return to society, he has taken great strides in recovering some of his faculties. In ways, he has recovered a great deal, and in others he has recovered very little of what it will take to return to ordinary life.
He carries with him constantly a small book, his “little book,” the doctors call it. Some of the staff conjecture that it is not with his own history that he will be filling the empty vessel of memory but rather with the contents of this remarkable book, that out of the reflections in this small volume he will structure a new self. For matters of therapy and pure curiosity, most of us have read it, at least in portion, when he will part with it, and it is indeed quite an extraordinary description of Arnauld’s old world.
As for how he passes his days, he listens to music, mostly a now-well-worn gramophone recording of the first movement of a Mahler symphony, his third I believe it is. He also has been constructing his imaginary city, which he began almost from his first day here. He loses himself in the project for hours, using scraps of paper and cardboard and wood to construct streets and buildings and parks and monuments, a model of the city he reconstructs in his memory, no doubt, the building, one hopes, of his sanity.
We will probably never know what dreadful experiences brought him to the desperate condition in which you found him, but we do know that even the most extreme trauma can be overcome with care and patience.
He is a very pleasant and well-mannered patient, highly dignified. The staff enjoy working with him and are very hopeful that he will regain the functions necessary for independent life. But he is still not able to sleep, and there are concerns that he is not progressing. He has reached a plateau, and can go no further. “We are waiting for a breakthrough,” one of the staff says. “He is stuck in no-man’s-land between light and dark. He is polite and compliant, but he seems to have no personal affect.” One suspects that he is developing a persona with nothing beneath it.
As always, I wish that I could be giving you a more sanguine report. I will keep you informed about his progress, but for the time being you can rest assured that Arnauld is receiving the very best of modern medical and psychological attention. As always, I look forward to your next visit.
With deepest fondness,
Jung
She had been back in Boston for six months, back to her role at the head of the Burden household, being the mother for her girls and Standish. The household ran efficiently in her absence, but she could see a few ragged edges of inattention. “We did well,” Susan said. “We got off to school every morning on time, and Mrs. Spurgeon served dinner every evening on time, and Father tucked us into bed each night.”
“We missed you awfully,” Jane cut in.
“It was the little things,” Susan said. “No one read to us at night, and no one played music with us. Those are the things that matter.”
From almost the moment of her return, she was aware of a change in her very being. Arnauld’s rescue and rehabilitation were now out of her hands and in the experienced care of Carl Jung and the doctors at the Burghölzli, the very best in the world. Naturally, she should have been able to relax and to reflect on all that had happened, but she felt captive to a residual nervousness and sleepless nights in which she was visited by images of violence and terror, some directly related to her time in Italy, some not. All of this she had to bear alone.
The music with her daughters helped. Nearly every day, they gathered in the music room and played together, piano, recorder, and cello. And she was aware of the healing power of the sessions, how she had always felt a wholeness while playing music, and now more than ever she felt a connection with her daughters and with the world. She wrote to Jung, “I don’t think I ever thought before how music for me causes the parts to come together. It is for me my connectedness of all things.”
One afternoon she found a copy of the familiar Haydn piece, and they played that, bringing back images for her of both Vienna and her evening in Italy. Standish would sit and listen to them with great attentiveness, and she would become aware how important those moments were for him and for his sisters. “Listen, children,” she said, “there is such beautiful harmony in this music.”
But as the anxiousness persisted, she found herself more and more in a reflective mood, worrying that something permanent had taken her over, until one evening a month after her return, a thought occurred to her. She was experiencing in a minor way what soldiers do after the horrific experiences of war. She could feel happening in herself what had happened to Arnauld.
That night, she wrote out her thoughts in a letter to her friend Jung. “How curious,” she wrote her friend, “that I should be experiencing, even in small portion, the devastations o
f those who return from war. Those around me would not understand, and would think me a malingerer were I to complain, but I feel the disturbances nonetheless.” And as soon as she mailed it, she noticed the anxious symptoms diminishing. “Simply acknowledging the effects,” she wrote later, “seemed to be part of the cure.”
The week’s demands for charities and public appearances as the competent and poised wife of the prominent banker Frank Burden resumed immediately, as if there had been no interruption and as if Eleanor had never been gone and had experienced nothing while away. The vestry of Trinity Church was planning a renovation of the meeting hall and had postponed doing the initial solicitations for the “significant gifts,” the rector called them. “We were waiting,” he said. “Everyone wanted you to do the initial asking. No one felt comfortable proceeding without you.”
And the Museum of Fine Arts was busy planning the spring tulip sale, and even with something as trivial as that, she seemed to be the only one who knew how to order the tulips. No one asked where she had been or what experiences she had survived.
Dr. Jung and the staff at the Burghölzli had notified the world of the return of Arnauld Esterhazy and had arranged for the continued visits of his parents. The milieu he had known growing up in Vienna knew the news that, in the midst of all the loss from war, at least Arnauld had been spared and was alive and recuperating in Zurich. Eleanor had seen to it that the people at St. Gregory’s received the notification. They were overjoyed.
To her great pleasure, a few weeks after her return, Eleanor received a letter from Alma, who obviously was thrilled at the news of Arnauld’s resurrection and was planning a trip to Zurich for a visit. “It will be invaluable for him at this time to visit with old friends. He needs very much to be reminded of the past he seems to have forgotten.” And in her letter Alma presented the remarkable news that Kokoschka had also returned. Though reported dead, he had been only severely wounded and had recovered in a Russian hospital. “He is now back in Vienna and causing a good deal of embarrassment. He has not responded well to my marriage to Gropius. My friends say that in his anguish he has rendered a sensational painting of himself with me in a tempestuous bed, wild with swirls of bright color. It is causing quite a stir.”
The Lost Prince Page 42
