62
“You Are Jonathan Trumpp”
In the month following her return, as she adjusted to the reactions to her experience abroad and returned to the myriad details neglected during her absence, she could not avoid feelings of apprehension, waiting for word from Jung and the Burghölzli. During that time there were three events that happened concurrently as far as we can tell: Will Honeycutt found out the full story, Jung’s letter arrived, and Eleanor had her dream. There is no way to determine the order in which the three events occurred, so we will assume them to be simultaneous. Jung had a theory of such a simultaneity, which he called synchronicity, a moment in which the physical and nonphysical worlds come into concert.
One day at the end of an afternoon of planning out investments, Will Honeycutt looked up at her and said suddenly, “I think it is time.”
“Time?” she said, genuinely not understanding his request.
“I think it is time you told me.”
“Told you what?” she said flatly.
“The whole story,” he said. “What happened in Vienna twenty years ago, where you are getting your investment information, how you knew Arnauld was alive, the whole story.”
“My,” she said, caught off guard, looking for a way out. “That is presumptuous, Will. You must know that I cannot talk about this.”
“I know it is presumptuous, but I think I need to, and deserve to, know. I have been your most loyal employee over the years. I have shared everything with you. You know everything about me. You have been my one constant friend ever since that day I signed on. It goes beyond business arrangements—” He stopped, searching for words. There was now a familiar wild look in his eye. “You believed in me when no one else did. I have served your intentions devotedly, with increasing ability—you must admit. I have no other life. I am not very graceful in my dealings with people, but I am very good at keeping confidences. You will have to grant me that. I am very good at serving as your secret accomplice. And now—” He paused. “I think I deserve to know.” He stared at her in a way that always made her feel uncomfortable.
“Well,” she said quickly. “That is quite a compelling argument.” She pulled herself together and she rose. “I shall give it consideration,” she said, heading for the door. “But believe me, Will, this is not information that you want to know. It is knowledge that has tormented me for twenty years, and I do not want it to weigh on your mind as well.”
The next day she arrived at the office early. Will was looking remorseful as she made her way to her desk. “Come in here, Mr. Honeycutt,” she said formally, and he walked in, about to offer apologies. But she began before he could say anything. “I have given your request the serious thought I promised. In fact, I spent a rather sleepless night thinking about it. I do think of you as my most loyal and even devoted partner. I suppose I had not thought about it before, but I did last night. There have been times when I could not trust you, but I have come to believe that now I can, completely.”
She lifted a well-worn leather volume from her desk. “And it is time. This is, you will see, the most confidential of documents. No one must know of its existence or its contents. It is from my time in Vienna, and I have added to it over the years. It is the ‘full story,’ as you say. I have shared it with only one person since my return, and he has now died. You will be the only living person to know the story.”
She handed him the volume, and, sensing somehow its significance, he hesitated a moment before he took it.
“Prepare yourself, Mr. Honeycutt,” she said, and she walked past him and left him alone with the leather-bound book that had for twenty years controlled her life. “Even you are in for a surprise.”
The next morning they met again. He had a disheveled look she had seen before, as if he had slept in his clothes. “Well?” she said.
“I have read it all,” Will said. “A number of times. I stayed here late and returned early.”
“And?” she said finally.
“There is so much to take in,” he said.
“I know,” Eleanor said, looking down.
“You wrote City of Music.”
“I did.”
“You are Jonathan Trumpp.”
“I am. Actually, Johnny Trumpp was the janitor at my college dormitory. He was Slavic and spoke broken English. I stole his name for an article.”
“The New York Times published your article and then sent you to Vienna, and you wrote the book.”
“More or less. Going to Vienna was my headmistress’s idea.”
“And you met this Wheeler, who wrote this journal, and you fell in love.”
“Yes.”
“He was killed and you wrote City of Music based on what he told you about Vienna.”
Eleanor nodded. “More or less.”
“And his ideas he had gotten from his teacher at St. Gregory’s School, and that teacher the boys called the Haze was Arnauld?”
“That is correct.”
“And the Haze also taught your son, Standish.”
Again, Eleanor nodded. “Yes.”
“And from this journal you knew, at least in part, how you were to invest the monies from the Hyperion Fund, monies obtained from selling a ring of the crown prince Rudolf.”
“Yes,” she said quietly.
“You know that one needs time to absorb all this,” he said, pausing for a long moment before changing the subject.
“I know.” She nodded. “It is overwhelming. You are not the first to encounter it all in one sitting.” She was thinking of her own first encounter with the journal twenty years ago, and then that of William James.
“As a result of this experience in Vienna,” he continued, “you made certain that Arnauld would be invited to teach at St. Gregory’s because you were certain that he was destined to become a great teacher of both Standish and the Wheeler of the journal. You knew that the war was coming and you knew that Arnauld would be drawn into it on the side of the Austrians, but you also knew that as terrible as the war experience was for him, he is, he was, destined to survive and return to Boston and his position at St. Gregory’s. And that is why you knew that it was up to you to go find him, and it is why now you are the only one who is certain that he will recover from the sorry state in which he finds himself at Dr. Jung’s hospital in Zurich, although you do not know how.”
The stream of words came forth from Will Honeycutt without a break. Eleanor listened without reaction, no affirmation, and no denial. “I do not know how,” she said.
Will’s tone changed to one of reverence. “This is amazing, overwhelming, and you can be sure that I will hold it in the strictest confidence. And that I understand, I think.” He paused, looking deep into her eyes. “You do not need to fear. I know the weight of this.”
“It is very complicated,” she said wearily, “and indeed overwhelming.”
Will Honeycutt smiled, something new in his eyes. She had become impressed by how stable he had seemed over the past months, completing a mysterious transition that had begun back in the Loeb office during the Northern Pacific business. Suddenly, for this moment, it was not only she who bore the weight of her knowledge alone. He sat before her, armed now with the full import of the journal. “You forget,” he said. “I am a scientist. I like to think about complications and complexity.”
“What you hold in your hand now has determined the course of my life.”
“I can see that. And I know now why you sought me out at Harvard, intruded in my life.”
“I am sorry,” she said. “I had to be—”
“No, no,” he interrupted firmly. “You don’t need to apologize. You have caused great and positive changes in my life, unbelievable ones, actually. It is all foretold here. I know now why our interactions must be as they are. I see all that now.” He held up the journal.
“You know now that it has been both a blessing and a curse.”
“I do. You think it is a curse because you must work hard to make
things come about.”
She said nothing.
“Has it occurred to you that this is destiny, that you need do nothing?”
“I can’t believe that,” she said with a grim certitude that caught Will by surprise, causing him to think hard for a moment.
“No,” he said. “I guess I can see that. And in your position, come to think of it, I could not either.”
“And now you know everything.”
“I do. Of course.” He paused and looked deep into her eyes. “All except that one part, when you found out about the other T. Williams Honeycutt, the right one. Why didn’t you—”
“Why didn’t I abandon you?” she interrupted.
“Yes, that,” he said. “Why didn’t you abandon me?”
She had now fully returned to the present, looking him square in the eye. “You know why.”
“Tell me,” he said. “I want to hear it.”
“Because,” she said. “Because I had grown very fond of you.”
“That was not in the journal.”
“No,” she said. “I improvised.”
He stared for a moment, absorbing all that was there. “Well,” he said, signaling his discomfort. “I am very glad for it.” And then he changed his tone, becoming businesslike. “You went to Vienna just now because you knew Arnauld was alive.”
“Yes,” Eleanor said softly. “I knew. From what had to be, I knew.”
“Because of this.” He held up the journal again.
She nodded, a seriousness returning to her face. “You know that to be true now.”
“Fortunate for him.” A silence returned between them. “His return means a lot to you, doesn’t it?”
“It means everything.”
“And he is trapped now in his inner world, and there is fear he will never come out.”
She nodded silently, acknowledging the seriousness of his probing. “Yes,” she said. “And you know something about that isolation, don’t you, Will?”
It was shortly after that conversation that the letter came from her friend Jung in Zurich.
My dear Eleanor,
I have waited to write until I had received the final report from the third doctor. Now I can deliver the conclusion with confidence that it is accurate and not merely defeatist. After a month of examination, and from three different points of view, my own in addition, I must tell you that the conclusion is that although Arnauld has received enough shock to produce psychological trauma, he has most definitely received physical injuries to his brain, of the kind that are, most unfortunately, considered permanent. One always hopes with war trauma that the emotional distress is causing the problem, not the neurological damage, and that the proper therapy will bring the patient back to normal. In the case of neurological damage, one hopes that the effects can be reversed by healing.
Emotional damage is difficult to assess, but neurological damage is not. After extensive analysis and examination, the staff have concluded that Herr Esterhazy’s primary injuries are neurological after all. The diminished state in which you found him in Gorizia will be with him for the rest of his life. In the opinion of the doctors here, the damage to Arnauld’s brain is irreparable.
I know the shock for you this message brings and if there were any way to avoid telling it to you so directly, believe me I would. I am only telling you now what everyone who cares for him must know.
Very sadly yours,
Jung
Eleanor stayed away from the office for a day, trying to think of what to do. She told no one but kept running the letter through her head. Carl Jung was a vibrant and optimistic man full of ideas. For him to reach a negative conclusion was the worst news she could imagine. “If Dr. Jung cannot see a way out,” one of the Burghölzli doctors once said to her, “there is no way out.”
When she finally did appear at the office, she found Will Honeycutt sitting at his desk. She told him she had news from Zurich and handed him Jung’s letter. Will took it and with concern on his face read it over several times.
“This is terrible news,” he said after a long silence. “The best doctors in Europe have reached a dead end. If they give up, no one will pick up his case, and he will be done for. I now understand what this means.” She nodded, still looking down. “I know what this means to you.”
At first Eleanor said nothing, then, “I am for the moment without words.”
“Dr. Jung has told you that there seems to be no way to get Arnauld past the state in which he hears and sees and smiles but shows no sign of any of his former intelligence or personality.” There was now a look of intense curiosity on Will Honeycutt’s face.
“This comes from a man who always sees possibilities,” Eleanor said.
Will Honeycutt sat with her in the Hyperion Fund office for a long time. “You know there is one thing in all this”—he held up the journal—“one thing that has troubled me.”
“And that is?”
“And that is that you believe you have chosen in me the wrong person, and have had to compensate for that choice over the years.”
“I know that,” Eleanor said. “And I thought that I have eased that troubling aspect for you. I have become happy with my choice.”
“But it was the right choice,” he said suddenly and with conviction. “Don’t you see, it was the right choice.”
“Oh?” Eleanor said. She had noticed the return of a wild intensity to his eyes, and she had learned in those moments not to get in the way.
“Your son, Standish, is to grow up to be a great hero, and to play a part in saving others. I know that from my reading.” Eleanor said nothing and only nodded. “Arnauld is destined to return from the war and be his great mentor, an indispensable piece of the story….” Again she only nodded. “Your son is to have a son who is destined to become another kind of hero in his time, and seventy years from now, in 1988, he is to become dislocated in time and show up in Vienna twenty years ago and write this journal.” Again, he lifted the volume.
“I know it is hard to understand,” she said now with compassion. “But, yes, that is true.”
“This journal upon which you are going to base the rest of your life, it is an accurate description of how things will turn out.”
“Yes, all that is true.”
“The list of investment. That is what you will do, all that you will bring about.”
Eleanor looked at him for a long moment, then said very slowly, “Not what I will do. What I did.”
Will Honeycutt looked puzzled for a moment, then showed with his eyes that even this most profound point was sinking in. “I understand,” he said tentatively. “That means that eighty or so years from now, you are going to return from Vienna and search for a T. Williams Honeycutt again because the name is written in this book, and once again you are going to find me, the wrong one,” he said in conclusion.
“Apparently so,” she said. “Yes.”
“It is so. It is destiny. But, don’t you see, you will do the same thing again. It is the right choice. It was in the past and will be in the future. Over and over. The right one.”
“Yes,” she said, now hesitantly, having followed his scientist’s logic and perhaps acknowledging it for the first time. “The right one.”
“And Arnauld,” he said now with a clear confidence. “Arnauld is the key to the whole thing. In order for the whole story to repeat itself, as it must, Arnauld needs to be back here, back at St. Gregory’s, back in our life.”
“Yes.”
“That,” he said, “is why you risked so much to go find him. And that is why you were successful.”
“Yes,” Eleanor said, now clearly shaken by this continued barrage of logical interpretation. “But then it is destiny. It should happen by itself.”
“No,” Will said quickly. “Not by itself. Don’t you see? You have had to act within it. That’s the whole point.” If possible there was now an even greater intensity in his eyes. “We have to act to make destiny unfold. This
is a partnership.”
Eleanor shook her head quizzically. “It is a lot to absorb, I know,” she said finally.
“We must create our own destiny. We must act to make the preordained happen. That is our obligation. I must tell you this,” he said, his eyes wide with revelation. “I know my role here. I know that I am not normal.” She tried now to stop him, holding up her hands. “No, no,” he protested. “I must finish. I know that I do not feel empathy or connection the way others do, and I obsess about details. You have been right in pointing out that I am good with the ticker tape but do not care about the people, that I know all about the parts in the automobiles but don’t care about the drivers. I am not able to care.” He was waving his arms. “I am not able to love.”
“Oh, Will,” she said, trying to intercede.
“No, no,” he said again. “I live in my own world of systems. Systems, systems, always systems. I know this. It is my tragic flaw. But now, just this once, I can do something. I care about you,” he said. “And I care about Arnauld. It is hard to describe or explain, but it is true. Just this once.”
“Oh, Will—” she began, and again he held up his hands, stopping her.
“Therefore,” he said with absolute intensity and absolute clarity, “that is why I must go now to Zurich.”
63
ELEANOR’S DREAM
It was right about that time, perhaps even that night, that Eleanor had the dream. When she awoke from it, she took care to record it in the most minute detail.
The scene seemed to be a number of years in the future, around 1926, when Standish was eleven. Arnauld, now fully restored and teaching again at St. Gregory’s, had agreed to travel to Dexter School, Standish’s school, to watch the closing activity of the fall boys’ competition. Eleanor had scheduled a car and driver to pick Arnauld up at St. Gregory’s, and they would travel together to the game. She found herself looking forward to a rare moment alone with him, acknowledging the pleasure of being near this man who had secretly meant so much to her for so long.
The Lost Prince Page 43
