Will Honeycutt paused, waiting, but no more came, so he said it. “It was his brain material that covered your face.”
“Yes,” Arnauld said, almost whispering.
“And you lapsed into unconsciousness. The Italians found you and thought you one of theirs. They took you.”
“I suppose.”
“That is what happened,” Will said with authority. “They heard you muttering about Beatrice, and they thought you one of theirs.”
“I suppose.”
“That is what happened, Arnauld. I am not making it up.” Suddenly, Will stopped and looked at his friend. “Arnauld, dying in battle is horrible. Those Italian soldiers, those horrible faces. Think of the deaths by infections you had to witness in your men. Your friend Pietr,” he said. “He was very dear to you.” The patient nodded. “You had become companions of the heart, I believe you wrote.”
Arnauld showed no objection to the term and remained unmoving and silent for a long moment, then looked up slowly and gave the slightest nod.
“The Czech Pietr was the best of humanity,” Will said. “He was a beautiful man.” Another nod from the subject. “And the explosion, it was devastating.” Another nod. “You came back to consciousness surrounded by blood and pieces of flesh. There were bits of flesh covering your face. You had seen it before, many times before.” Arnauld said nothing, only grimaced.
“Arnauld, look at me,” he said, and waited for the patient to look up, now he the one losing control. “Pietr the Czech poet, your friend, his death was horror.”
“It was all horror,” Arnauld said softly, with almost no emotion. “So much horror.”
“Descending from Caporetto you came upon men, gassed, scores of men grotesque, frothing at the mouth.” Again a grimace from the patient, but no response. Arnauld looked paralyzed. Suddenly Will Honeycutt broke the silence. “It was your fault,” he said, raising his voice now, accusing. “Eugene of Savoy came to you, told you, talked you into it. You were supposed to emerge as the charismatic leader. You were supposed to get them to stop, and you didn’t. It is all on your shoulders, all your fault.”
A glassiness having come over him, Arnauld seemed to fall back into the abyss in which he had been for the past few months.
“Arnauld, look at me,” Will Honeycutt insisted, and he waited. “You think it is your fault,” he said. “Prince Eugene of Savoy, the great hero, came to you, spoke to you, and you could do nothing, and it is all your fault.”
Will Honeycutt stopped, looked hard into the blank stare. Suddenly he was aware that he had pushed too hard, gone too far, his old bluntness with people resurfacing. The blank look had returned to Arnauld’s face. There now existed between the two men an empty silence. And all seemed ruined.
In his meeting with Jung the next day, the doctor expressed his concern about reports he had received from the Burghölzli. “Our method with this patient, as with all patients, has been to wait things out and allow the unconscious to reveal its secrets as it will.” He had assumed a kindly, fatherly tone. “You have gone on the attack, pursuing what you think is right. But, you have to appreciate, it is a method many at the Burghölzli find counterproductive.”
“They think I am bullying,” Will Honeycutt said, and Jung nodded. Will stared at him for a moment. “I think I can make it work.”
“You attacked and attacked and won’t retreat—”
Will Honeycutt interrupted. “Until he confronts the horrors he has seen and experienced firsthand.”
“Yes,” Jung said, “that would seem the case. It is just not our way. I am sure you understand.”
“But you had reached an impasse,” Will offered in protest.
“I will grant you that,” Jung said. Even this brusque American could see that the Swiss doctor was retreating. “For the time being, perhaps—”
“But I am getting past that impasse,” Will said, his brusque manner now fully surfaced. “Don’t you see?”
“Perhaps we need to discuss this later,” he said, pulling back in his chair.
Will Honeycutt, usually not one to notice even obvious language of body posture, sensed that he was losing. He stopped and tried to compose himself.
“Dr. Jung,” he began, “I know I am an abrasive man. I know I offend people with my manner. I know I am offending you now. It has been that way all my life. But this time I am right, don’t you see?” He stopped and looked for some kind of affirmation in the intense eyes of this man who knew so much about human nature, but there was none there. “Dr. Jung,” Will repeated. “Can I just have more time?”
Jung eyed him silently. “The doctors will do what I ask.”
“And will you ask for more time?”
Jung thought for another long moment, again assessing, and then said, “A few more days. I can ask for a few more days.”
68
THE FOLLY OF MEN
The next morning when Will Honeycutt walked into Arnauld’s room and placed a copy of Chapman’s Iliad in his lap, the patient only stared at it blankly and said nothing.
“I would like you to read to me,” Will Honeycutt said, impatient, tapping the spot on the page, and there was still nothing. “Very well,” Will said. “I will read,” and he proceeded to read scenes of battle in the Iliad until it was time to leave for the boathouse on the Zürichsee. In the auto on the way, Will feared that the regression was complete and that Arnauld would not row. Perhaps his brusque manner had ruined everything.
But after the usual routine and Arnauld, in his rowing shorts and jersey, was seated in the shell and pushed off from the dock, he began to row and headed out onto the mirrorlike smoothness of the lake. Exactly forty-five minutes later he was back at the dock.
For the rest of the day and into the evening, Will Honeycutt, patient again, read to his friend and got no response. The doctors at the Burghölzli avoided them both. The next day the same thing happened, and it was late at night, just as Will was thinking of calling it quits till the morning, that the change came.
They were back to reading the Odyssey and had arrived at the end, after Odysseus’s men had been drowned, and the hero had sailed home alone to Ithaca. There was a passage in which the citizens of Ithaca blamed their leader Odysseus for not bringing their sons safely home from war. Will read the passage and then stopped. Then he read it again, and looked up into the face of his friend.
“Arnauld,” he said, “look at me. For God’s sake, look at me.” The persona of any mentor far gone, it was now just the very fallible Will Honeycutt himself, alone with his friend. And he might have been imagining it, but for just an instant he thought he saw a flash of recognition in those vacant eyes. “It is not his fault,” Will said, and there was nothing. “It is not his fault. Don’t you see”—and he enunciated each word slowly—“it is not his fault.”
And then, after more excruciating silence, he saw the lips move in what might have been It is not his fault.
Quickly, Will turned back in the book and found the passage about the bag of wind, and he read it aloud. “Did you hear?” he said when he had finished. “They were in sight of land, in sight of home. Odysseus had done all he could. He had convinced the gods to seal up the winds so that they could come home, all of them. Safe and sound from the war.” Will saw the eyes move and definitely saw a flash of life in them this time. “Whose fault was it?” he said, and then stared into the face. There was another long, painful silence.
Will Honeycutt saw the lips move first, then the words came. “The men,” Arnauld said.
“Arnauld,” his friend said, “it is not your fault.”
“It is not my fault,” came in little more than a whisper.
“Whose fault is it?” Will said.
There followed a silence, and then Arnauld Esterhazy uttered a single word, in little more than a whisper. “Men,” he said, and Will Honeycutt repeated his question.
This time the words came out with clarity. “Men,” Arnauld said, and then added very distinctly,
“The folly of men.”
And the next morning when Carl Jung heard of it, he had tears in his eyes.
69
HOMECOMING
BOSTON, 1919
On a late summer afternoon, Eleanor stood on the platform at Back Bay Station waiting for the 3:50 train from New York. She was accompanied only by her young son, Standish, having decided that the girls and her husband, Frank, would stay home and offer their greeting there. She had also decided that it would be better if Will Honeycutt traveled to New York and met the ship from Le Havre and arranged for the train to Boston. She would be waiting at Back Bay Station.
She had been nervous and anxious all day, as the time seemed to pass with excruciating slowness. As there had been no word from New York, she judged that everything had gone smoothly, and she gathered Standish and left for the station much earlier than was necessary.
In the time that had passed since her return from northern Italy and Zurich, much had transpired. Will Honeycutt’s treatment had brought about what Carl Jung considered a near-miraculous breakthrough, one that the doctors at the Burghölzli believed would affect greatly the manner in which battle trauma would be viewed and treated.
“Once Arnauld could express outwardly the extremity of his trauma,” her friend Jung wrote, “his unconscious mind permitted full access to memories which had been denied. This change in turn brought about his near-complete return to normal, a return from the underworld.”
The change became so thorough that before Will Honeycutt left his post at the hospital to return to Boston, it was concluded that the patient was fit to leave and continue his rehabilitation in his native Vienna, a step Will had prepared for by assigning the patient’s cousin as his companion and helper. He had very carefully recruited Miggo Sabatini to the task and to live at his cousin’s side for the months of the return to his former life there, including life at the university and in the cafés. Miggo had very detailed instructions on exactly how he would conduct his assignment, serving as Arnauld’s “extroverted alter ego, the perfect guide for the last part of the journey out,” as Will said. “Miggo knows not to stop the readings.”
“Be relentless,” Will Honeycutt had said, as if the impossible cousin needed coaching.
“Don’t worry,” Miggo replied. “I know the value of the letters and the readings and the memorials. I shall give him no rest.”
When Eleanor heard of this turn in the tale of the restoration of Arnauld Esterhazy, she smiled, thinking it a brilliant move, and she enjoyed receiving letters during this phase of the rehabilitation from both the mentor and the subject.
During this rehabilitation period, she also received a letter from Fräulein Tatlock and read with great pleasure that Herr Jodl had become a regular visitor at the pension and that he had heard word from the Italian government that his son was definitely among the many Austrian prisoners of war detained near Rome during the complexities of postwar negotiations.
She also heard from Edith Hamilton, from her girls’ school in Baltimore. Edith was overwhelmed by the news of Arnauld’s being found alive and then by the reports of his restoration and his need for further rehabilitation. “I shall bring him down here to the Chesapeake,” she wrote, “and take him up to Maine. We shall rediscover ancient Greece together and renew our work on our catalogue of the classic myths. I shall give him no rest until he is back to his old self, as good as new.”
And then as Eleanor waited with her own son on the platform of Back Bay Station, she heard the sound of the approaching train and Standish’s exuberant, “Oh boy. Here it comes,” not really clear on who it was exactly they were there to greet.
She knew the position in the line of cars where they would be disembarking, and she watched as a few passengers appeared in the doorway and then stepped down onto the platform, the conductor watching to see that there were no missteps. Then suddenly Will Honeycutt stood in the doorway, and her heart began to race, and Standish burst out with, “Here he is!” thinking his mother’s longtime business associate the reason for their long wait at trackside. And immediately behind Will Honeycutt, the cousin Miggo appeared, now exercising his American citizenship, looking from side to side a little nervously from the train car doorway, then stepping down into the world of Boston.
And then time stopped. As the two men stepped down onto the station platform, behind them in the train car doorway a handsome and distinguished European appeared. He was tall and alert, with a clear-eyed presence that might have caused anyone to stop and notice. He looked down to where Eleanor and her son were standing. For an instant he flinched as if his eyes were adjusting to the light or he was unable to absorb immediately what he was seeing. And then he smiled, a smile of such radiance that it should have been captured by a great photographer or painter. He was looking straight into the face of Eleanor Burden, and she returned the gaze for a long moment.
“Oh, look,” Standish said. “Look who it is.”
It was Arnauld Esterhazy.
Arnauld’s smile in the doorway of the train car contained for her the whole world. As she stood rooted to her spot on the train platform, watching as his focus shifted from her own radiant face to the boy, she did not move. And then the moment he descended the steps and touched foot on the terra firma of the station platform in her Boston with his arms out, her son responding by rushing toward him, the sight crystallized the myriad thoughts coursing through her mind. She found herself overcome, transported to the dream of a few nights before, of standing with Arnauld, the fully recovered teacher, the Haze, a few years hence watching Standish perform heroically in his football game. Everything seemed to fall into place. She had done her job.
This lost prince returned, saved from the horrors of war, would resume his role at St. Gregory’s and become the Haze, the legendary teacher he was supposed to be. The boy, her son, Standish, growing up under his tutelage, would rise to become Dilly Burden, the great hero of countless campaigns at Harvard, and go to war himself. In this role as a warrior, in pre-Blitz England, he would meet the love of his own life. She, already pregnant, would deliver a son, whom Dilly would accept as his own son. This boy would grow up—after the death of his father in war—and, acquiring the name Wheeler as a result of his prowess in baseball, become a legend himself, a musician, one of the most recognizable faces of his generation. And then, through a miracle, he would end up in Vienna in 1897 at the same time as her sojourn there, right after her graduation from college. All of this would now fall into place.
And now, standing on the train platform in Boston’s Back Bay watching Arnauld Esterhazy and her son embracing, she could for the first time in twenty years transport herself back there to the scene that had for years been too painful to recall: Wheeler Burden, the love of her life, standing surrounded by beautiful Secessionist paintings. In an instant, something broke loose, something permanent she was to discover, and she found herself able to travel there now in her mind, and for the rest of her life relish, rejoicing in what she found, content with the role the experience had given her on into the future. Suddenly it all fit together, all the parts: William James, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Will Honeycutt, the Hyperion Fund, Franz Jodl, even Miggo Sabatini.
In retrospect, it would amaze her that the one simple event of Arnauld’s return from war, healthy and in full possession of his faculties, had caused such an explosion in her. The world was now, because of this return, as it should be: The past was what it was, the future would be what it would be. “We meet each other in dreams,” her great love had said to her, and she herself had repeated. Now, suddenly, in a rush she could see it all. Now suddenly she believed.
And even Frank Burden played his part willingly, oblivious to much of what went on, missing out on much because he did not wish to “engage the world at their level,” as he had stated proudly, referring to Freud and Jung, and perhaps even William James, but also to much of what she had done and believed. Always the literalist, as he called himself, Frank would watch his son gro
w into the great hero with whom he could identify, watching him be sacrificed in war and finding a kind of steely pride in that sacrifice.
She revisited Vienna now and would comfortably into the future, welcoming the poignancy of the memories and their powerful gifts to her. She watched Arnauld and Standish, man and boy, embracing, and she approached them smiling. She reached out to join in the embrace, not as a lover or even as a mother, but with the objectivity of a temple priestess, not so much with the power of Athena now, but with that of the Egyptian goddess Isis.
She allowed herself to drift back to that time, felt herself back in the artist’s studio in Vienna, back in the arms of the love of her life, feeling as he called it then “the connectedness of all things.” She reached out and touched this restored and healthy man Arnauld Esterhazy, who meant so much to her life, and she touched her son. The two princes.
And, for the first time in more than twenty years, she allowed herself to hear the music.
It was the music of Vienna, the music of the waltz.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Like its predecessor The Little Book, this novel is a work of imagination, but it derives much of its context from actual history. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung really did go to Clark University and then Putnam Camp in the Adirondacks in 1909; J. P. Morgan actually did miss, for some unknown reason, sailing on his White Star liner Titanic’s maiden voyage; the World War One scenes really did play out in their horror on the Isonzo River in northern Italy; and the Spanish Flu added its devastation to that of the world war in 1918.
A number of sources were essential from the story’s beginnings, particularly The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915–1919 by Mark Thompson; Jung: A Biography by Deirdre Bair; William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson; Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (Annotated Edition) by Edwin Lefèvre, Jon D. Markman, and Paul Tudor Jones; and Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology by George Prochnik.
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