Then Eleanor herself became ill, and fell into a deep fever, slipping away to join her mother, she thought in her fevered state, losing contact with the world.
“You must prepare for the worst,” Tom Ballantine told the staunch Frank Burden. And prepare he did, with a countenance grim even for him, deciding to stay at his wife’s side, in spite of the risk to his own health.
And this time Rose argued with the master of the house. “Let me be the one, Mr. Burden,” she said. She had just returned after being gone for two days, to take the body of her husband, Tom, back to Fall River for his funeral. “If we lost you, the children would be in a terrible way.”
But now Frank was the adamant one. “Thank you, Rose, but I shall stay by my wife’s side. If I take ill, so be it.”
Eleanor’s fever increased, and she could feel the searing pain invading her lungs. This now is how it ends, she thought, passing in and out of delirium, aware of her husband sitting beside her bed, her steadfast and loyal guardian, she now totally unable to care for her family as they had all become accustomed. She could only lie there in high fever, too weak to protest this further departure from the future that needed to be, imagining herself being transported to Vienna, the city of so many of her dreams.
In her delirium she became aware that Susan’s bed was empty and stripped beside hers. “What of Susan?” she would have asked had she been able. Racked with the pain of coughing, almost completely out of her mind, she was aware that everything was lost, but she herself now was too far gone to care. She lost all connection to the world of the living.
When she awoke finally, it was as if from a deep, fitful anesthesia. She saw the empty bed beside hers, and she knew the worst. “What of Susan?” she asked finally, barely able to form words. No answer came to spare her, and she stopped asking. Barely back to life herself, she was still too weak to care or to make herself understood. She passed back into the deepest of sleeps, as if dropping back into an underworld, this time peaceful and relieved of concern.
And she dreamed. The one she recalled later with great vividness was a return of the dream of her mother, dressed all in white, on a picnic blanket. She gestured for Eleanor, then the girl Weezie, to come sit down beside her. She was accompanied by a stranger, a handsome man, this time, also dressed in white, a bearded man who resembled Dr. James. They were lovers, and they welcomed her together. Each time the dream recurred, she tried to join her mother but never quite could.
Then one night, in the dream state, she became aware of another presence in the room, off in a recessed corner at first, almost unnoticeable, where she had been for a long time perhaps, then stepping out, unmistakable for the faint rattle of armor. It was the familiar guardian of her past come to stand watch, she of the fierce gray eyes and the Medusa medallion. “Have you always been there?” Eleanor asked, and the goddess only nodded and stood her ground. It was then that Eleanor fell again into the most peaceful sleep.
Her fever had broken, and she awoke to an unearthly, almost blissful calm. She rose from her bed, weak, and in her nightdress, she stepped out into the hallway, filled with dread at what she would find.
She walked like a ghost. Everyone was gone from the house, and she had the rooms and hallways to herself. Everything seemed to be in a haze, like the border area of a dream. At first there was only silence, then she heard music and drifted down the stairs to the living room, toward the sun porch, where the upright piano stood.
The music came to her more and more clearly and she recognized its probable source, but still not fully aware if she was imagining this or not, she came to the door of the sunroom and stood motionless. There before her were two young girls in white dresses, one before a music stand, playing an alto recorder, the other seated at the piano, her hands roaming over the keys. The sunlight spilled over them as they played, unaware of being watched. Beside them, in its case, was a cello, Eleanor’s cello. Many times she had sat in that chair beside the piano, music stand in front of her, and played first with Susan, as she learned piano, and then adding Jane, as she began learning the recorder. The two girls looked up at the ghostlike figure in the doorway, and for a moment all three figures remained frozen, then they all burst into life.
“Mother!” the older of the two said, leaping to her feet. She then exclaimed, “You are well!”
“Oh, Susan!” burst out of her, and Eleanor’s two daughters rushed to her and buried themselves in their mother’s arms and the folds of her nightdress. “You are saved,” the mother said with what little energy she could call up, joy and relief on her face. “We have survived after all,” she said.
Rose walked in on the end of the scene, when she heard the commotion, and watched from the side, her eyes filling with tears. “I don’t know what I would have done, ma’am,” she said to Eleanor later. “You are so much in my life.”
And that night Frank Burden came into the bedroom where she still slept alone and sat beside her on the bed. He too had tears in his eyes for the first time she could recall. “I thought I had lost you,” he said with great gravity, looking shaken and for just a moment uncharacteristically helpless, in a manner she had never seen before. He expressed in a moment something she had known secretly for years, something she would know forever. In spite of all his bullish self-confidence and rectitude, Frank Burden loved her and needed her. Her presence at the center of his life had been paramount for a long time. “You are my very life to me,” he said. “To lose our girls would shake me to the core,” the staunch Frank Burden said, now unable to hide his deep concern. “But to have lost you would have been for me life-ending devastation.”
“I know, Frank,” she said with conviction, reaching out and placing her hand on his, knowing full well what needed to be said at this moment. “You will not lose me. Now or at any time.”
And in the middle of the next night, still sleeping alone, she rose up, weak but no longer aching or fighting for breath, the fever now totally gone, the words “We have survived after all” repeating in her now-lucid mind, which the Athena strength had reclaimed, and she spoke aloud.
“Arnauld is not dead,” she found herself saying. “I shall go to the war and find him.”
PART
FOUR
38
ARMISTICE
The end of the war came with a surprising suddenness in the fall of 1918. What had seemed to those watching from Boston, an ocean away, like a hopeless stalemate ended with first rumors of requests for peace from various parties and then the news of the armistice on November 11.
Of course, for Eleanor the war was inseparably linked now with the devastating arrival of the influenza and the separate peace its equally abrupt departure had brought her household.
“It was worse than the war,” Will Honeycutt said with his usual bluntness the first day she was strong enough to pay a visit to the Hyperion office. “I thought I had lost you.”
“We were fortunate to be spared,” Eleanor said.
“War and pestilence,” he said, “a terrible combination of horsemen.”
Some claimed that the spread of that dreaded plague on both sides had caused the war’s sudden end, although others claimed it was the American entry or Germany’s inability to press on. However it was, the Germanic alliance began falling apart, and the Allied countries, including now the American forces, were emerging devastatingly victorious in France and northern Italy.
Throughout the year 1918, there had been in Boston first a great anxiety about the pandemic and the endless European war, and then an enormous sense of relief at the possibility of hostilities ending. There was wild jubilation when that peace became fact.
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, as the bloody stalemate of northern France began to swing in favor of the Allies after the Battle of Amiens, the German populace went into revolt, and eventually the Germans had no choice but to end fighting. The result was the mutual end of hostilities and the armistice.
The Austro-Hungarians had lost the
ir will to fight months before, it was said, and were interested in suing for peace, which the German kaiser did everything to thwart. Because of Arnauld’s letters that had come through the diplomatic channels without censorship throughout the war, as well as her fated foreknowledge, Eleanor felt that she had a better understanding of the Austrian side of things. But then after the letters stopped and the report of his death came, she was left with only impersonal news sources for her information.
Now, in early November, she read with relief and surprise how the armies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire simply fell apart on their Italian front, the signal of war’s end. Rumor was that hundreds of thousands of Austrian soldiers were taken captive in the final days, a detail that gave her at least slim hope that somehow in the confusion mistakes had been made, even confirmed reports of death in battle might be somehow overturned.
So, in early November, with the armistice a near certainty, and the influenza subsiding, Eleanor wired her friend Carl Jung that she was planning on traveling to Zurich as soon as possible. Jung was at first amazed at the audacity of his American friend, then pleased that she would be attempting such an unexpected visit. So happy was he to think of the end of Swiss isolation that war had brought that he put aside any natural wariness about the dangers such a trip so shortly after the end of fighting might entail. It never occurred to him that she meant she was coming alone, with her almost four-year-old son.
Insulated for the four years of European war, the Swiss doctor was glad to have his first visitor from America, and Eleanor was happy that she would be able to see him. She had known for some time from his letters that her friend was having a very difficult time with the great rend in his life, his separation from Sigmund Freud, and she had wanted to help somehow, but after the release of the dogs of war, as he called it, in August 1914, there had been no way she or any other American could travel to neutral Switzerland.
When she first told Will Honeycutt her intentions, he pointed out that by all accounts Arnauld was dead, and it was a sad fact that they all had to accept.
“But I know that he cannot be. It is something of which I am absolutely positive.”
“Have you been given some new information?”
“No,” she said. “Nothing new.”
“But what we learned already from the letter was decisive. You and I both read the report from Jung’s Herr Jodl. There were the three witnesses you required. The evidence is unavoidable. You said as much yourself.”
“I am going, Mr. Honeycutt,” she said with unmistakable conviction.
“You are quite convinced?”
“I am quite convinced.”
“Just as you were quite convinced about Cincinnati Soap and Candle and the Northern Pacific stock and the other miraculous tips?”
Eleanor nodded ever so slightly, with as little commitment as possible.
“From the same intuition?”
Again, she nodded, even more slightly. “The same.”
And Will Honeycutt shook his head again. “Well, since I know about that intuition of yours, I should be the last one to doubt. But still, there is no evidence that there is any chance he is alive. He’s dead.”
“Still, I plan to go,” she said.
“Arnauld was my friend,” Will Honeycutt began. “If there were a possibility, I’d go—”
“I know that of you, Mr. Honeycutt, and Arnauld knows the depth of your loyalty.”
“I know of no possibility, but if you go, I’d better come with you.”
“I am going,” she said with conviction. “And I intend to go alone.”
“Then, that is that,” he said. “At least I can help you find a way. Jesse will know.”
“If I can just get to Zurich, Carl Jung can get me to Vienna, and from there I can manage what is necessary.”
The next day, Will reported back to her. “Jesse says it can be done,” he said. “He says to ask a banker. Men of finance let no logistics stand in their way.”
So she turned to her husband, Frank Burden, as she was planning to do anyway, whose expertise in the ways of European banking might prove invaluable. “Of course, it could be done, theoretically,” Frank said without emotion. “But I don’t know what man in his right mind would wish to do it right now. The negotiations of the travel would be difficult, not to mention dangerous. I do know some who accomplished travel to Switzerland, financial advisors and such, even before the war’s end. Finance must move on, you know. But it is too dangerous to take on right now. Perhaps after the armistice has been formalized a venturesome man could give it a try.”
“This is not theoretical, Frank. I wish to go, and I wish to go now,” she said.
Frank was startled of course, but then could see from that look he knew well that she was indeed serious. “That is preposterous,” he said. “What man would go with you right now?”
“I wish to go alone.”
“Now, that is ridiculous,” Frank said with a dismissive laugh. “You exaggerate, I know, but it simply cannot be done.” He gave every sign that he wished the conversation to be ended with his declaration.
“I am not hyperbolizing, Frank. I am planning to travel to Switzerland, and I am heartened by the fact that you know people who have done it. I shall simply replicate their journeys. I would like your help.”
Up until that point in their marriage, they had disagreed on nothing, or so it seemed to Frank. Eleanor made most of the domestic decisions, “running an organized household,” Frank called it, but on the few occasions when he wished something done or not done, he simply stated it, in the positive or negative, and it was either done or not done, according to his will. It was his wife who always acquiesced quietly, as things ought to be. Of course, Frank had no way of knowing that in the secret matters of her life as a financier, his wife did what she alone willed and her husband had neither influence nor knowledge.
“I am not sure that such a trip would be wise so shortly after the hostilities,” he said, softening his usual style. His tone was cautious and respectful, giving her the benefit of the doubt, but expecting agreement.
“Frank,” she said, looking him square in the eye, “I am going. First to Switzerland.” She paused. “And then to Vienna. And then”—she paused again—“to wherever I must. But definitely to Vienna.”
The words stopped her husband in his tracks. The mention of that city they had shared twenty years before and not mentioned since hit him with great force. Accustomed to expressing himself robustly, Frank instead swallowed hard and then stared at her. His wife had just played her emotional trump card and the discussion was over. He managed a brusque “I see” to acknowledge the fact. “What about our children?” he added, thinking it a rhetorical question.
“Standish will come with me,” she said abruptly. Soon it became clear to Frank that his wife had thought it all out. “The girls are old enough to fend for themselves,” she said. “They will stay with you. Mrs. Spurgeon will give them and you the support you need.” There was no question by this time that Rose Spurgeon could run the household with efficiency and grace. Frank looked at his wife quizzically, anticipating perhaps but disbelieving what was coming next. “Standish will come with me,” she repeated.
Frank Burden, past being stunned, now looked overwhelmed.
“He is of strong constitution,” she continued. “And he can manage.” Their son, Frank Standish Burden Jr., was almost four, and for a number of reasons, some open and some darkly secret, she had decided almost immediately to bring him with her.
“I see,” Frank said, nodding his consent, aware suddenly that in the presence of this woman’s power of conviction, he had limited choice in the matter.
With Will Honeycutt, she was even more direct. “It is my destiny,” she said. “I think you of all people know that, Will.”
“I of all people do know that,” he said solemnly.
“You will tend to the business.”
“Of course—” Will began, but she cut him off.
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“And keep an eye on things.”
“Of course,” he said.
“Good,” she said. “I will find comfort in knowing that those dear to me will tend to matters at home.”
And so ended this and any further conversation on the matter.
She called Susan and Jane together on the sun porch and told them she wished to have a “family meeting,” the name the children had given those times when she and Frank sat down with them to explain some family issue or matter of urgency.
The girls came bursting into the room and sat beside their mother with expectant looks. “Is this dreadfully important,” Susan said, “or just something minor?” Her older daughter’s directness always made her mother smile.
“It is just that I have something of substance to tell you,” Eleanor began. “I will be going to Europe, and I shall be gone for a considerable amount of time.”
“But there is war in Europe, Mother,” Susan said.
“Are you going to be a spy?” Jane said, bursting forward.
“No, I fear it is nothing so romantic as that. I just need to go see an old friend who has suffered in the war. Now there will be an armistice, and I can travel where one could not before.”
“But who, Mother?” Susan asked.
“Yes, who?” Jane joined in.
“Our friend Dr. Jung, in Switzerland. The armistice will allow it, and make it safe.”
“An armistice is a peace, isn’t it? I learned that in vocabulary,” Jane said.
“Yes, it is a peace, and the war will be over. I will be gone for a while, and I am taking Standish with me.”
“But he is so little,” Susan said.
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