The Lost Prince (45 page)

The review of details by Jodl, the funereal atmosphere of the city, the scene of people scouring for food and fuel all threatened her great resolve, and suddenly, by surprise, she found herself thinking of Will Honeycutt and what he would have done. “We are going to get control of this situation,” she said to Fräulein Tatlock, who had already begun to look more animated by her new charge of tending to young Standish. She went back to Jodl. “We are going to get control of this situation,” she repeated.

By nightfall, she had made arrangements to travel by train out into the countryside and meet with a family of farmers to bring back, in exchange for some of her store of coins, a supply of flour, eggs, some meats, and even coffee beans, to stock the modest kitchen of a small boardinghouse. Austrian currency was virtually worthless, but she had been told that American bills or coins worked magic. Then, and for the rest of her stay in Austria, Franz Jodl would be at her side, carrying the supply of American dollars in a briefcase and protecting the treasure, it appeared from his constant grip, with his life.

BERGGASSE 19

E
leanor had always wondered if she would ever return to Berggasse 19, one of her first stops in Vienna. The place had seemed a part of her destiny. As she climbed the stairs and felt her heart racing, she thought of how much had changed in the twenty years since her last visit here, how much she had learned of the world, how much of it she had seen. She thought also of the Vienna journal’s accounts of visits here, of conversations which she had read about over and over to a point of near memorization. It was from those accounts that she had formed most of her opinions of Sigmund Freud and his theories. She arrived at the top of the stairs and knocked, without giving herself time to pause or retreat, then waited for the maid she knew would answer and allow her in.

Nothing had changed in the small, wood-paneled foyer. A couch stood against the wall beneath some etchings of classic Greek figures. Eleanor felt a strangely comfortable familiarity as she sat waiting the second time, recalling the first time twenty years before when she had known nothing of the man she was about to meet and nothing of the fame that would descend upon him during the two decades between her visits.

The door opened suddenly, and she found herself shaking the hand once again of the most famous man in Vienna. “We meet again, Frau Burden,” he said in curt but distinct English. “It is my great pleasure.”

“As it is mine, Herr Dr. Freud.” He ushered her into his study and gestured to a chair beside his desk.

Dr. Freud wore a black armband, as she knew he would, the symbol of
the loss of his beloved daughter Sophie to the influenza earlier that year. Just as Vienna was beginning to suffer the deprivations from years of war and the breakup of the empire, the dreaded pandemic that would take fifty million lives worldwide between 1918 and 1920 accompanied the hunger and cold. Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and his wife, architect Otto Wagner, and the editor of the
Neue Freie Presse
were among the well-known Viennese to fall along with Sigmund Freud’s dear Sophie.

“You have only gained in impressiveness,” he said, once both of them were seated, he behind the desk.

“You are kind,” she said, pausing. “I am sorry for your great loss. My daughter and I both came down with the dreaded influenza, but somehow we survived it. For a time I thought I had lost her, and my family thought they had lost me.”

“Some were fortunate,” he said. “And some not. It has been a second war, right here in our homes.”

“So it is,” she said with a shudder.

He changed the tone. “I am glad to have this opportunity to thank you, Frau Burden. I learned of your part in my invitation to America in 1909,” he said. “Much about that visit was vexing to me, and it was not until much later that I learned of your role in the creation of that event.”

“I was able to play a minor one,” she said quickly.

“Quite the contrary, Frau Burden. I hear that you caused it all to happen, both in its conception and its funding.”

“That is exaggeration,” she said, “but I am grateful for the recognition of my small part.”

“Well, you may know that I had less than favorable impressions of your country.”

“You referred to us as savages, I believe,” she said with a little laugh.

Dr. Freud looked uncomfortable for a moment. “I overstated. It was not an entirely pleasant experience for me because of stomach problems.”

“The impressions were nowhere near mutual, as you probably know. Your ideas were very well received. You are now very highly regarded in America.”

“I am grateful for that.” He paused and let his eyes penetrate. “I was most honored to meet Dr. James. For me, he was the main attraction in going to America in the first place, and the attention he gave me, in spite of his illness, was most appreciated. You were very close to him, I gather.”

“He was my godfather, and very dear to me.” She had become accustomed to referring to William James in this manner.

“I wondered, of course, what he thought of my ideas. We had a chance to speak very briefly, but never in much depth, and then, of course, the world lost him.”

“He was very impressed,” she said quickly, misrepresenting James’s impressions a bit. “He said on many occasions that your ideas were the future, and at the very end he expressed regret that he would not be able to see how those ideas played out.”

“I sensed that he felt more in agreement with my former colleague Dr. Jung. I know he was interested in the spiritual aspects of our science, what he called parapsychology. I know that he consulted séances.”

“Yes,” Eleanor said. “The supernatural was always intriguing for him, but never with any certainty. It was always possibilities that intrigued him.”

“And, as you know, not an interest of mine, a disappointment to Dr. James, I fear.”

“I think you underestimate the impression you made on him, and on all the guests at Dr. Hall’s conference.”

“Perhaps,” the great doctor said, then paused, giving his guest an evaluative glance. “And I gather you and my former colleague Dr. Jung have corresponded.” He paused again in such a way as to imply more.

“We have corresponded,” she began, then paused herself, long enough to match his implication. “We have become friends.”

“Dr. Jung talked about his Putnam Camp conversations with you on our sea voyage home from New York. Of all the influences that caused him to drift away, I believe, that afternoon with you was the greatest.”

“Oh my,” Eleanor said. “I hope that is not so.”

“Dr. Jung is very impressionable. You are a very compelling conversationalist, I gather. I think he was quite influenced, smitten even. He reflected a number of times on our return trip that you were kindred spirits.”

“All of us Americans were quite taken by both of you. You made a powerful impression with your visit, as you no doubt heard.”

“Dr. Jung is very compelling in his intensity,” Dr. Freud said, refusing to be distracted, and she could hear the hint of irritation in his voice. “He is drawn to intimacies beyond what his former colleagues were drawn to. I gather that the two of you have become quite close.”

“We have corresponded.” The great doctor could most likely hear a defensiveness in her voice. “That is all.”

“You need not worry, Frau Burden. I am not one to judge. You are both adults,” he said with an attempt at the cold dispassion for which he was famous.

“Our intimacies have been limited to correspondence,” she said, now with a bit of irritation in her voice.

“I wish neither to imply nor to pry,” he then offered, and she let it lie.

“We are here to talk about Herr Esterhazy,” she said. Eleanor had written him as soon as she arrived in Vienna. She wanted to make use of his experience and great deductive capacity.

“That is right,” the great doctor acknowledged.

“You are kind to receive me.”

“I wish to help. Herr Esterhazy is dead in the war. I am terribly sorry to hear that. We have suffered greatly as a country and as a city. And I fear that our own folly in enthusiastically rushing to war has brought great suffering upon ourselves and upon the world.”

“You had much support in that folly.”

“I suppose we did. Anyway, many many young men are dead, your Arnauld Esterhazy included.”

“I do not believe him dead. You know that.”

Freud took a long look at her, measuring exactly how he was going to approach this. “As is your assigned role,” Freud said, referring for the first time, she deduced, to his knowledge of her past in Vienna twenty years ago, and the journal. “But you must know that there are numerous very reliable reports and witnesses, too many to be dismissed.”

“Yes, I do know that,” she said. “And yet I have reason to believe that he is still alive.”

For a moment he said nothing.

“Of course. I understand,” he said, accepting the stalemate. “Your faith is strong. That causes us to revisit our very basic difference from the former time.” He had his reasons to believe the man was dead, and she had hers to believe he was alive. They had accepted this stalemate and armistice twenty years ago, neither venturing to try to persuade the other, each fully invested in believing a contrary version of reality. “You have lived your life according to your faith,” he said.

“And you according to yours,” she said.

“Nothing has happened to shake either of us from our convictions.”

“Oh, you can be assured that I have had quite a bit of shaking,” she said pointedly. “There have been predicted events, granted, ones requiring research and execution.” She avoided mentioning the one enormous one. “It has not been without considerable complexity and struggle.”

“You have carried out your assigned tasks, I assume.”

“Yes, the predictions have come to pass, and I have benefited greatly. I have created a fund, as instructed.”

“I understand that,” he said without emotion, the closest he came to admitting that he had indeed done some research about her and her visit.

“And what you have seen unfold in the world has not caused you to reconsider your original skepticism?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“And what then of the events you heard predicted,” she said, pressing him, “the ones you have seen come to pass?” She looked into his serious implacable face. “What do you make of the epic tragedies, the
Titanic
sinking and the advent of the great world war? They were both foretold.”

“Life is full of coincidences,” he said, more as a scientific observation than a defense. “Awful tragedy and coincidence.” He paused to gather his thoughts, then continued. “When I was in medical school, on one of the wards there was a mental patient who was so convinced that he was king of Prussia that he convinced others, and he was so persuasive in his claim for a particular investment that one of the interns put a good deal of money into it and made a small bundle. There are coincidences,” the great doctor concluded.

“It seems to me that in the case of the
Titanic
alone that there have been more than just coincidences.”

Dr. Freud stared at her for a moment. “We are at a standstill, Frau Burden. You take as literal the words in the mysterious American’s journal, and I do not. You are like the Mormons in your country who follow literally the words of their Joseph Smith and his gold tablets. I am like the nonbelievers who see him as a charlatan. It is simply a matter of faith.”

“Then it is pointless for us to approach this matter in this way.”

“It is,” he said, with his famous clarity and conviction.

“And nothing more?”

“Nothing more.” The certitude in his voice signaled clearly that he had
not budged in his opinion of their shared experience twenty years before. “Coincidence, and nothing more,” he reiterated, just for good measure.

“And what of the evil child?” she said.

“There was indeed in this city before the war a young man of the name Adolf Hitler, from Lambach,” Freud said calmly, trying not to show that he had indeed been keeping track. “I did take notice to that extent. But the young man in question is a failed artist and a lowly corporal in the kaiser’s army, I believe, and now lost in the great struggle. Not much earth-shattering significance there.”

“I am not here to dissuade you,” she said, more vehement with her eyes than with the words. “I am only here to solicit your assistance.”

“What help could I, a nonbeliever, give?”

“You could tell me where to find Arnauld.”

“You are interested in retrieving his body?” The words came out more coldly than the great doctor perhaps intended.

“Please,” she said. “I have come to retrieve
him
.”

Dr. Freud, a notoriously stubborn man, looked for a moment as if he might argue. Then he paused. “Of course,” he said abruptly. “We will proceed according to your beliefs, not mine. You have traveled a great distance to be here, and I respect that. You have honored me with this visit, and I am duly flattered. I wish to help, as I said in my correspondence. It is your conviction that Arnauld Esterhazy will emerge from this brutal war alive, and we shall honor that conviction.”

“Thank you,” Eleanor said flatly.

“It is your conviction that Arnauld Esterhazy will emerge physically intact, is it not?” She nodded. “And that he will emerge emotionally scarred perhaps, but physically unmarked?”

“Yes,” she said. “That is essential.”

“It is your conviction that eventually he will regain his full mental capacity, with no permanent physical impairments?”

She nodded. “Exactly.”

“In your version of the story he will become a legendary teacher of schoolboys.” She nodded her silent appreciation of the great doctor’s acknowledgment of at least a part of her version of Arnauld’s story. “He has lost no limb or eye nor sustained any marring physical wound.” She nodded again. “Emotionally damaged, I assume, but capable of total rehabilitation.”

“Yes,” she said. “Of that I am certain.”

“Then,” Dr. Freud said, “we know exactly where to find him. There is only one possibility. We know now that there is a way to sustain the most horrible damages from war that have little to do with physical impairments. The unrelenting and repeated shock of war can render its victims, although perfectly fit physically, unable to function normally, in some cases totally so. If one could somehow recover from this horrible condition, one would resume life in an absolutely normal manner, the manner in which your version of the story describes Herr Esterhazy in the future. But for the time being, if he were victim of this war trauma, this ‘shell shock,’ the English call it, he would be totally unable to identify himself or to care for his own recovery, thus causing his disappearance and presumed death.”