The Lost Prince (19 page)

“Henry is not well. It is those dark moods of his, you know. He is despondent and needs the comforting perspective of his older brother. We leave in three days for his home in East Sussex.”

“Are you sure you are strong enough to make such a trip?” The deep concern she felt was obvious on her face.

“Oh, yes,” William James said, nodding as if to acknowledge that he was famous for making do, carrying on, going the extra mile. “It will be
quite restful, actually. Alice and I love ocean travel, and Henry’s England is magnificent this time of year.”

“Am I wrong then to worry about you?” She suppressed a shudder, thinking for just an instant of his obvious fallibility.

“You needn’t worry, dear Eleanor,” he said with a warm smile that attempted reassurance. “I shall miss you though. You brighten my day so with your visits.”

“They mean the world to me. You know that.” She had long since grown accustomed to the closeness they shared. Earlier, she had been uneasy about his reputation of being attracted to younger women. There was the example of the young and brilliant Pauline Goldmark, a Bryn Mawr student with whom, around the time of Eleanor’s Vienna visit, he entered into a three-year correspondence, and who seemed to enter his conversations regularly in a way that certainly caused speculation and talk, whether there was anything but platonic attachment. And, it was rumored, such behavior certainly caused a strain on his marriage, whether anything showed on the surface.

He had always showed a great loyalty to her, one she could never fully account for. No matter how busy he was, he always dropped everything when she visited him, listening to her intently, genuinely interested in what was on her mind.

In her youth she tended to take his attentions for granted, enjoying the small gifts and occasional attendances at significant events of her life, like school ceremonies and graduations. That he had been a close friend of her parents was Eleanor’s explanation. “Dr. James had been empathetic to a young girl losing her mother,” she told her Winsor School friends when they would ask how she was so fortunate as to have the attentions of such a famous man. But later, as her interests began to broaden and deepen, he was someone with whom to share ideas. However it was, she cherished her visits to him now, as she had all her life.

On the eve of her wedding to Frank Burden in 1902, when Dr. James agreed enthusiastically to stand in at the ceremony, in a rare moment of affectionate candor, he admitted to his feelings of guilt at allowing her severe and puritanical aunt, her father’s sister Prudence, to take over the duties of her upbringing. “I and others should have interceded on your behalf,” he had said then without elaboration, words she treasured then and for the rest of her life.

“There is much I need to tell you, before my trip,” he said on this visit, leaving out any mention of what might happen during the strain of travel abroad. But it became clear to her in retrospect that a certain foreboding caused him to choose that particular moment for what he was about to reveal. She pulled a chair up close to his and leaned forward, taking his hand in hers.

He smiled at her characteristic eagerness and took a deep breath, allowing his tired eyes to sweep over her face. “What I will tell you now, I have not told another soul for over thirty years.”

“I am ready to listen,” Eleanor said, her usual enthusiasm diminished only slightly by his solemn tone.

“Before Alice and I married,” he began, “before we met even, when I was still in my twenties and very much at sea as to my vocation, I fell quite deeply in love with my cousin Minnie Temple, a very forceful young woman of great vitality. And for a time she was the world to me, but she had tuberculosis, which proved to be fatal. I almost died myself of grief. I was deeply moved by a friend, a married woman my age, who reached out to me with comfort and solace.”

He paused then, making it clear that this might be a lengthy narrative.

In 1872, William James, new to his teaching position at Harvard, was thirty years old and very much adrift. His health was not good, his professional future was not in any way certain, and he was subject to recurring bouts of depression. Charles W. Eliot, Harvard’s bright new president, had begun a renaissance at the college and had very much wanted James to be a part of it. The young scholar with a very scattered academic background had taken his first teaching job and had loved it, his true calling, he realized. But what to teach?

The position was in medical science and physiology, but young James really wanted to teach philosophy and what he called “mental science.” Minnie Temple’s death that year from tuberculosis had taken the wind out of his sails in the most profound of ways, and with his poor health he doubted that he could ever be a husband or a father, let alone an energetic teacher of college students.

His younger brother Henry, one of the pillars of his life, had moved to Italy first, then England, a departure that benefited Henry’s writing, but a blow to their brotherly closeness. And thus, in many ways, William James was indeed adrift, and alone.

Before Henry left for Italy, he had introduced William to a young married couple, two of his acquaintances in Boston. The husband was a young man of promise, and his young wife was a beautiful and vivacious hostess, in their beautiful home. Their living room, her “salon,” as Henry called it, was a stimulating and restful place to settle on a weekday evening, as Henry had done often before his departure for Europe, and William had continued in his brother’s absence. The young wife, it turned out, an unusually insightful and compassionate counsel and comfort, had known Minnie Temple and had mourned her loss along with many of William’s friends. She had also a deep interest in the ideas of the transcendentalists, having met, like the Jameses, many of the Concord group in her parents’ home. In short, she was a compelling companion for William at this time in his life, and she possessed what William called “a remarkable ability to listen.” He had never met, he admitted to his brother, a woman of such beauty and energy for ideas and a depth of knowledge and understanding. “It seemed that every time I began on an idea or a complex sentence,” he said, “she anticipated its direction and became ready to absorb the thought and enrich it.

“Somehow during discussions with this beautiful and sensitive woman, both the grief I was feeling and the ambivalence about my life at Harvard seemed to come to calm and resolution,” he said. “It was during these conversations that I began to form confidence in both my professional and personal beliefs.” At her side, he began discovering what he really wanted in his life, focusing on philosophy more in his teaching with a vigor and energy that had been lacking before. “What had been scattered,” he said, “became connected, what was vague and amorphous became crystal clear.” More than any other influence in his life until then, this remarkable woman caused him to gain perspective and to bring about change. The feminine strength she radiated became infused in him. “I was discovering new dimensions of my very being.”

There was, however, unanticipated consequence. What had begun as comfort in a great loss blossomed into mutual and passionate attraction. The two friends both became deeply conflicted about what was emerging, and in the fall of 1873, he bearing the worst of the guilt, it seemed, still fretting over his discomfort with teaching medicine at Harvard, William decided to travel to Europe, to meet up with Henry in Italy, to rest and sort matters out.

But not far from his reasoning was the substantial fear that his attachment to this attractive young Boston wife had gone much too far and needed intercession.
She had become for him, he feared, like Coleridge’s opiate, and he needed an escape.

His time with Henry in Italy proved to be unsettling rather than restorative. His own ill health seemed to have returned, he found the grimmer and grittier sides of European poverty distressing, and he admitted to being deeply homesick, longing for the inspiration of the married and respectable young woman back home. Then Henry became ill, and William tended to him, leading his younger brother to call him his “ministering angel who nursed and tended” him “throughout with inexpressible devotion.” Somehow, helping his brother seemed to work wonders with his own illness, and he began to feel stronger. In March, he sailed for home, writing a very simple and respectful letter to the young matron advising her of his return.

Upon that announced return, guarded as they were against such a reaction, the two met with an ardor that stunned them both, “a wondrous meeting of souls, minds, and bodies,” William described it privately to his sister, Alice, without naming the subject of his emotional outpouring.

After his return, William began working with the medical school, and he began recognizing his significant debt to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great friend of his father who was now in his seventies. The two friends shared a poem by Emerson: “Give all to love. Obey thy heart. Nothing refuse. ’T is a brave master,” the great transcendentalist said. “Let it have scope. It requireth courage stout. Souls above doubt, valor unbending. It will reward.” Sharing these words, the two clandestine lovers fell into each other’s arms. And, as desperate and passionate as they were, realized from almost the beginning that they had to cease and desist.

With the most painful of resolutions, they agreed to part and not see each other again. It was during that resolute period of parting that they discovered that she was pregnant.

As he approached the end of this telling to Eleanor the story, in which William had avoided using names, a heavy silence fell now between them. “She was one of the most beautiful beings I have ever known,” he said. “A total companion of the soul. Giving her up was almost my undoing, and I fear that even today she occupies, after all these years, a significant place in my heart.”

“What happened to her?” Eleanor breathed, barely able to utter the words, for fear of what she would hear.

“We avoided each other as well as one could in tight-knit Boston society. It was a matter of high resolve on both parts. I found Alice, the second dear Alice in my life, and, most happily, we married.”

“And the woman?” Eleanor repeated, still breathless.

“Nine years later she died,” he said, and the two of them could only stare into each other’s eyes. “Diphtheria,” he added softly. “She died with her young son, leaving behind her eight-year-old daughter.”

A profound silence fell between them in that moment. When she spoke finally, it was in little more than a whisper. “It was Mother.”

“WE SHALL MEET AGAIN”

T
he first of her most precious letters, the one from William James, was obviously written in the long hours of his Atlantic crossing and was mailed from England back to Boston as soon as the ship docked.

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.”