Before he left, she and William James had a number of conversations about his monumental revelation and about something new she wished to share with him.
Upon hearing Dr. James’s revelation about her mother, Eleanor had been speechless. “Why did I not know?” she said when she had collected herself.
The old philosopher had paused. “Because from the start it was thought better that you not, that no one know.”
Neither spoke, these great believers in words. “I am glad to know now,” Eleanor said finally. “And I have something I must share with you.”
She returned the next day and found him sitting in the same spot with the same blanket in his lap. She looked greatly touched. During that night of her hearing the details of her birth, sorting through all the implications, she had decided to share with the great philosopher the Vienna journal. She had been able to share it and the details of her time in Vienna with no one. Now she decided to include this special man in her secret.
“There is something else about me that nobody knows,” she said. “I must now share something deeper with you.” She held out toward him an offering. “This journal tells a complicated story, one it will take much time and rumination to understand. You will have time on shipboard. I shall entrust it to your care.”
He took the offering from her and from the look of concern on her face knew immediately that it was important.
“I will protect it,” he said immediately.
“When you read it, you will understand my whole story.”
“I shall cherish the opportunity,” he said, having no idea the significance of what he held in his hand, this volume from Eleanor’s time in Vienna that explained all.
“Be warned,” she said. “It is a complex and troubling tale.”
“I am good with complexity,” he said with a gentle smile, his hand on the journal, “and with trouble.”
His letter arrived back in Boston a few weeks after his departure.
My dear Eleanor,
As you can imagine, I have given much thought to our poignant conversations on the eve of my departure. While shipboard with much idle time I have read several times the fateful volume you gave me and spent hours trying to absorb its contents, as you anticipated, quite a task to occupy myself in the long hours at sea. I know full well the monumental revelation on my part that caused you to share your monumental contribution with me. I conjecture that you have had, as I have had, much quiet time to sort through the multiple and varied implications. I look forward to my return when we will have opportunity to sit and talk about the many layers of your extraordinary tale.
Above all, you must know the great weight of responsibility I feel for not being attentive to your childhood. I knew that while your dear mother was alive you were the most fortunate of children, given the very best of caring nurturance with no need for anything that my attention could have provided, and the circumstance required that I stay far removed. But, as I have told you, at the time of her passing I should have interceded and prevented the atmosphere provided by your overly austere aunt and your disconsolate father, some of which I did not realize until reading this extraordinary volume. That was a grievous error on my part, one for which I find it difficult to forgive myself.
As to the journal, it explains much and leaves much open to contemplation. Primarily, on your return from Vienna in 1898, one close to you, caring as much as I did, could not help noticing the change in your very demeanor and carriage. Now I realize the depth of that change. You had suddenly grown up and gained an almost unearthly maturity and perspective, a “loss of innocence,” I believe you called it, “the great theme of all literature,” a phrase from my brother Henry that you attributed originally to me. Now I know and appreciate the cause. You saw much and felt much, more than many people could have borne. And yet you carried it with such dignity and grace that no one, I included, suspected the depth and poignancy of what you had experienced.
Although I do not know yet all the details, as they were not within my purview, I sense that you are engaged in finance in an uncommon way and that your involvement with the Hyperion Fund, as prescribed in the journal, is more than passing. Your financial help with Stanley’s conference in 1909, with its invitation to Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and the remarkable luring of Gustav Mahler to New York were your assigned tasks, carried out efficiently and executed well, in all secrecy. Your prescribed participation in those events is remarkable, as has been your influence on me and my thinking. Taken literally, your contributions, my dear Eleanor, might change the course of history.
You have known investments to make and world events to anticipate. I had no knowledge of any ship christened the Titanic, but our captain here, when asked, has observed that the White Star Line, owned by Mr. J. P. Morgan, I believe, is now in the process of building an extraordinary pair of ships in Ireland, one with that mythic name. They will not be completed for two years. The thought that such a ship would sink on its maiden voyage, and that you—and I now, if I am alive then—are aware of that awful fact in advance is staggering, a great weight to bear. The fact that our current century is to bear two devastating wars is unthinkable, and, one hopes, not accurately foretold.
I have been ruminating on a most profound notion: that, because of what in it has already come to pass, some by your intervention, some not, this journal is the source of your strong faith in the future. It is your holy scripture. Is it not? It is the foundation for your faith just as the Gospels are the foundation of fundamental Christianity or the Upanishads are to devout Hindus. Is it not? For you, as for the most devout fundamentalist, it is a literal document, the determined fate, the future laid out in certainty as an absolute. It is determinism, and yet you have lived as an independent woman within it, your faith strong and purposeful, your independence admirable.
And for Dr. Freud the contents of this journal were and remain metaphoric, impossible to accept as literal truth, and open to the broadest interpretations. Just as the great doctor believed the author to be delusional, you believed him to be the bearer of truth. And for you it is all as real as this moment we share across continents. I suspect that in this remarkable situation I would have sided with you. I am grateful that you have shared all this with me.
You know that since the death of our infant son, Alice and I have sought out many sources of spiritual interaction with what we call reality. That has been a lifelong study of mine, never believing one way or another that such forces are or are not present in our world. You may recall that I had much in common with your friend Dr. Jung on this score, and that I found disappointment in his colleague Dr. Freud’s unwillingness to accept the mere possibility of what we call parapsychology.
What I wish to communicate to you more than anything else, now that we have both shared our auspicious secrets and their consequences, is that parapsychology or no, spiritual intervention or no, the burden you carried away from Vienna in the form of this journal is staggering and not for the faint of heart. Since your childhood, I have had the greatest respect for an inner strength I have always believed you acquired from your extraordinary mother.
Your experience in Vienna has put that inner strength to a monumental test, and I could not be more proud of you. Be well until we can meet heart-to-heart. You know how much my heart, flawed as it is, is with you.
I look forward to long conversation with you, my beloved daughter.
William
William and Alice returned by ship to Quebec, not Boston, arriving in mid-August, and by the end of his time in England, he had to be carried on board. They passed directly to their summer home in Chocorua, New Hampshire, to recuperate and regain strength. And that is where Eleanor was summoned to see him. She made the long journey from Boston, first by train, then by carriage. He was so weakened from the England journey that he could no longer hold his head up. He was taking both digitalis and morphine.
“I hate for you to see me like this,” he said to Eleanor. “I wanted you t
o wait until I had my strength back and to remember me always as a vibrant man.”
“Oh my,” she said with authority. “You will always be in my mind the most vibrant of men.” She paused.
“And when this frailty passes, we will have time for long discussions. I regret so—”
She stopped him with a gently upraised hand. “You were always a pillar for me.”
He had too little strength to object. “Oh, there is so much still to account for,” he whispered.
“We shall have time,” she said, not knowing if that was true.
“You must go tend to your family and to Arnauld Esterhazy, your guest from Vienna. He has a big job to do,” he said, this being the only reference he made then to his knowledge of the journal’s predictions. “He is the linchpin of it all.”
She nodded without saying anything, finding comfort in the fact that now at least one other person shared her knowledge of what was to be. “You know about that now, don’t you?” she said.
And William James barely nodded. “Yours is a powerful story,” he said. “We will have time to discuss it all at length, when this weakness passes and Alice and I have returned to Cambridge.”
“I will return to Boston, but I shall wait for you. You will come.” He nodded his head slowly. “Do you promise?”
“I promise,” he said, his voice barely audible. “We shall have time to discuss at length the whole remarkable story.”
“You don’t think it preposterous then?”
“I think it intriguing.”
“Dr. Freud heard the whole thing, as you now know, and he found it preposterous, the work of a madman.”
“Dr. Freud’s is an important voice, and he will force mankind to revise its view of itself, not unlike Copernicus and Columbus and Charles Darwin. And you were absolutely right to promote his ideas as you did. But on some matters Dr. Freud has no imagination. Your friend Jung sees possibilities. Dr. Freud sees certainties.”
“And you too see those possibilities in the journal?”
“Yes, I do,” he said weakly. Then he paused a moment to gather his strength. “In a few years you will give birth to a son who will grow up to be a great hero at Harvard and elsewhere. That son—my grandson, I might add—will have a son and give him his name. That boy will in turn grow up to be a famous personage and eighty years from now, dislocating in time to Vienna twenty years ago and meeting you, will write this journal. That is quite a conception, is it not?”
“It is indeed,” she said.
“Then you will return to Boston when I am still vigorous and we will begin long wonderful conversations.” He paused again for breath and strength. “The greatest fulfillment of my life,” he continued. “Reminding me so much of your dear mother.”
“It has been great fulfillment for me also,” Eleanor said then.
William James was now conserving breath, choosing his words with great care. “In eighty years,” he said, “this Wheeler will find you in Vienna. At that point, you will return once again, and we shall reopen our connection. And all this.”
“That is so,” she said.
“You see, my dear daughter, we shall meet again.” And he paused again. “I greatly look forward to that.”
Then she prepared herself to return to Boston, saying her farewells to Alice and then to William James, who had not moved from his bed.
She leaned down to kiss him good-bye on the forehead. Then the great man looked into her eyes, too tired now to lift his head off the pillow. They exchanged a few last words, and then they parted, she indeed returning to her responsibilities.
Opportunity for further talk never arrived. William James died a few days after her departure, on August 26, 1910, in his beloved summer home in New Hampshire, his head resting in his wife’s arms. Afterward, the autopsy showed acute enlargement of the heart. It was noted later that the great philosopher had drawn from that weary heart, right up until the end, every ounce of available energy.
For the rest of her life it meant the world to Eleanor Burden that among his last words to his daughter had been “We shall meet again.”
20
ARNAULD ARRIVES
After all her efforts getting Arnauld to think of coming to Boston, none of them easy—the steady use of letters, first making brief suggestions that he might consider short visits during his days as an undergraduate at the University of Vienna, then gradually becoming more and more specific—the feat was actually accomplished and Arnauld Esterhazy had actually accepted a position teaching young boys at St. Gregory’s. Eleanor found herself relieved beyond words and amazed. But like so many other details prescribed by her fate, she had worked hard and then found herself surprised by exactly the predicted outcome she had been working toward all along.
The connection with Will Honeycutt at Harvard and Cambridge had become a vitally important element. She had thought the strategy up as a way of giving Arnauld the possibility of an intellectual life to compensate for the one he had given up in Vienna. The promise of invitation to Boston homes, she concluded, might help him see perhaps that life in Boston could be a reality he would greatly enjoy. And, of course, the frequent visits to her own home would be the icing on the cake. She knew that her grand scheme to bring him to Boston was a great intrusion into his life in Vienna, but she knew also that his arrival was a necessary step in the destiny that was to be for him in the end a great fulfillment: his becoming the great and legendary teacher of young men that he was meant to be.
Finally, one late summer afternoon, as she stood on the platform at Back Bay Station and waited for the afternoon train from New York—Will Honeycutt had traveled to Hoboken to meet Arnauld’s steamer—she realized that the whole plan really might work out as intended. Then there he was, standing beside his new American friend Will Honeycutt, smiling broadly, and happy to be in what he called “this brave new world.”
“I do so appreciate the work you have done to bring about this happy occurrence in my life,” the shy Arnauld said a little stiffly in greeting her and accepting her kiss on each cheek.
“And I hope that it lives up to your greatest expectation,” Eleanor said. “This is a happy day for me. That is for sure.”
“I hope to prove worthy,” he added.
“I think you will adapt quickly,” Eleanor told him.
“If eagerness plays a part, I shall,” Arnauld Esterhazy said, “as my eagerness to be here is without bounds. I feel, at least for the moment, as if destiny has called me here to Boston.”
“It is an eagerness that you will find reciprocal,” Eleanor said. “Here and elsewhere. Your arrival has been greatly anticipated.”
Arnauld did in fact adjust to it all well. He was a generous and entertaining guest in responding to all manner of invitation, always the center of much anticipation and attention, always a much-sought-after guest, “quite the rage,” a friend called him, “there is something in his shy manner that makes everyone want your cultured Viennese friend on her guest list.” Sometimes Frank and Eleanor Burden accompanied him on these social outings, and sometimes not. Arnauld, ever comfortable and gracious, didn’t seem to mind.
His adaptation to teacher of young boys at St. Gregory’s School was not quite as effortless, but in time even that went well. At first, the young teacher’s “European” demeanor was perceived as “an air of superiority,” as the headmaster reported, but soon the boys began to realize that his bottomless and boundless command of history and geography would serve them well. It was the younger boys, the fifth classmen, the thirteen-year-olds, who discovered it first in their geography class, and then the older boys in world history, the second classmen, always the harder to win over, came around. By winter term, Arnauld Esterhazy was a fixture, and no one could remember why they had not warmed up to him in the first place. Arnauld, for his part, seemed captivated by what he called “the American boy’s independence of spirit, like the country.” And, perhaps predictably, he fell in love with the peculiar sport of America
n football. “There are adults in Boston,” he told Eleanor, “who actually believe it of capital importance that St. Gregory’s defeat its rival in sport.”
And, of course, Eleanor, secret engineer of it all, found great relief in the degree to which Arnauld found amusement in the new life he was accommodating. It could so easily have turned the other way, she thought. But then she admitted that in her anxiousness about his adaptation she did not take enough into consideration her new guest’s unusual appreciation of newness and of life itself. “You are a wonder,” she said one chilly Saturday afternoon in November, as she stood beside him—he wearing the school colors in the wool scarf at his neck—at one of the older boys’ football games. “You have thrown yourself into the life of the school with admirable forbearance.”
“I forbear nothing,” he said with a broad smile. “I love the vitality of it all; in fact, I have found myself wishing that I had been an American schoolboy.”
In his moment of arrival in the new country, with all its stimulations and adjustments, Arnauld’s letters home to his mother and father began in earnest. It was because of these letters, Eleanor discovered later, that for his parents there was little question that Arnauld had taken to the surprising new teaching position in a foreign land with relish because of his continued attraction, to the point of adoration, to this woman they had never met, Eleanor Burden. There were in these letters home descriptions of the minutest detail of how he loved the thought of being in this Boston woman’s presence, of being invited to spend time in her home, of watching her two girls grow and flourish that would be, it was concluded later, worthy of a book.
My dear parents,
I have absolutely fallen in love with the American autumn. The contrast between the hot humid days of September and the crisp cold mornings of November is worthy of a poem by one of their poets—John Greenleaf Whittier or Walt Whitman, whom I have discovered—and of course the change in colors from the intense green to the famed oranges, reds, and yellows is the advertised spectacle. There is a quiet seriousness to the school day, which I quite enjoy, and a boisterous celebration of every weekend, much of it centered on one sporting event or another, usually their unique sport of football, in which the ball is passed from hand to hand and hurled through the air, so different from our game of feet. I joked when I first saw it that it ought to be called handball, but no one saw the humor in it.
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