The Lost Prince (48 page)

And suddenly, while reading, she began to be struck by an unavoidable reality: For one of Arnauld Esterhazy’s remarkable sensitivity and astute perception, the experience of war would be absolutely devastating. She read, and she found the experience heartbreaking.

As she read further, she found herself revisiting involuntarily the feeling of guilt she had experienced with Arnauld’s mother. What she had engineered over the course of many years and what had come to fruition that one evening on Beacon Hill was required of her. That was her justification. What she felt for him now, what she could share with no one, came back to her in recalling her uneasy moment with Arnauld’s mother.

She read with pain and joy knowing that it was she who had caused this talented and sensitive young man to come to the new world of America and open himself to this new experience he described with such enthusiasm.
Now, reading each line with affectionate attention, her complex feelings of attachment only increased.

One letter among all of them stood out especially. It was written in the heart of war, approximately nine months after his departure from Boston, and it reflected at the same time heartbreaking naïveté and worldliness. “Eleanor has written of the birth of her son, whose name will be Frank Standish Burden Junior. Since it now appears to me likely that I shall never be blessed by either matrimony or fatherhood, I shall consider this very special child like my own.”

When she had finished the letters, she saw at the bottom of the box a simple notebook of the kind used by schoolboys. It was worn and marked with rust-colored blotches that could have been mud or human blood. She opened the book and flipped through the handwritten pages enough to identify them as descriptions of war experiences, and to see that it was filled with graphic descriptions of what Arnauld had been through, his war journal, she would call it later. The pages were written in English, no doubt to elude accidental readings by comrades and the prying eyes of censors.

Wedged within the pages at the back of the notebook was a single photograph, a commercial image perhaps from the Italian cinema printed in the subdued tones of a wall decoration. It was a romanticized representation of a well-dressed man, suave and debonair, a lothario with his hair slicked back fashionably, leaning into the neck, whispering into the ear, of a beautiful and enchanted paramour. On the back, dated from the time of Arnauld’s Roman visit with his cousin before the outbreak of hostilities on the Isonzo front, was this inscription:

She held the photograph for a moment and thought the image a strange one for Arnauld to carry in such a place of importance through his immense ordeal, and it was not until later that Will Honeycutt explained for her its likely significance.

She had put it and the notebook aside, and now gave her attention to the bundled letters and noticed the one last letter that had sat on the bottom of the collection. It was sealed and addressed to her. She opened it and read slowly, this one last letter that answered everything, that caused so much to fall into place.

It was, she knew, the missing piece.

A LINGERING CURIOSITY

E
leanor had postponed her meeting with Alma until after her visit to Arnauld’s parents at their family estate and until after she had paid her respects to the cemetery in Grinzing, the section north of the Ringstrasse. She had researched the exact location. The morning she walked there was gray and cold. As soon as she was standing before the large stone column marking the grave, as she expected, a rush of emotion came over her. The art deco lettering at the top of the column read
Gustav Mahler
.

The fact that he was now celebrated as one of Vienna’s great musicians and that his grave marker was frequently visited by admirers was supremely ironic given the rude treatment he had been subjected to in the press and anti-Semitic harassment he had endured in his last year at the state opera, before his departure for New York City.

Because of the anonymity she had insisted on, nearly a decade had passed now and no one knew the part that Eleanor and the Hyperion Fund had played in that move to America nor in the authorship of the book,
City of Music,
that had stirred up so much interest in him before his arrival.

In that last visit, when Mahler’s heart had failed to near the point of breaking and he and Alma were to sail that last time for home, just before
their departure from New York, Eleanor had arranged to meet alone with the great musician for the first time.

“We know each other from your visits to Boston,” Eleanor said.

“Of course, I know that,” Mahler said, responding as if challenged. “You are a great supporter of music there, and a great supporter of mine.”

“But do you remember from before,” she asked him, the first time she had mentioned it, “from 1897, when the young American Weezie Putnam fainted dead away in your studio?”

The great musician, by then enfeebled by his grave condition, thought back, with a tired look on his face. Then slowly a spark came into his eyes, and he smiled. “Why, yes,” he said wistfully, without the energy to register surprise. “Why, yes, I do. She was a very pretty and very—” He paused. “Very young. It is not every day that one experiences such a dramatic event.”

“I was that American girl,” she said.

Mahler looked confused, then took a long moment to examine the face in front of him, and then smiled again weakly and nodded. “Why, yes, I see that you are.”

“You made an advance.” She said it without emotion.

“Oh my,” he said, nodding, exploring the memory more deeply. “I hope you have forgiven me.”

“I have thought about it from time to time since that day. I am greatly embarrassed that I fainted dead away.” Then she smiled gently into his careworn face. “I have always considered it—very secretly, mind you—a great compliment.”

“I hope that you have,” he said.

“I was in the thrall of your music. I had traveled from Boston to meet you.”

“I hope you were not disappointed.”

“How could I have been? I had the privilege of hearing you conduct at the state opera. And it was thrilling. When you did allow me an audience, I commented on your symphonies, how I had experienced them only in the sheet music. I said I had never heard anything like it.”

“I am sure I was impressed by that.”

“You were. You were gracious and charming.”

“And still you fainted dead away.”

“Had it been later in my life, later in my development, you might say, I would have perhaps responded differently.”

Mahler, tired and ill at the end of his life, closed his eyes and smiled, as if he had just taken a sip of his most favorite fresh, cold
heuriger
wine. “The young woman had come to Vienna,” he said finally, “to meet me, I believe she said.” Eleanor nodded. “To hear my music and ‘to write something of significance,’ were her words.”

“You do remember,” Eleanor said.

The great musician looked genuinely interested now. “Did you indeed write such a work of significance?”

“I did, at least to my mind.”

“And its name? Perhaps I have heard of it.”

For a moment Eleanor thought of withholding the title, keeping it forever a secret, but then she relented. “
City of Music,
” she replied.

Now Gustav Mahler looked really confused for an even longer moment. “I know the work,” he said softly. “It is said here to be the work that made my reputation in New York.”

“I too have heard that,” Eleanor said.

“But this
City of Music,
it was written by a man, a Mr. Trumpp, I believe.”

Eleanor said nothing but gave a slight gesture of resignation with her eyebrows and hands, which Mahler seemed to understand. “I see,” he said, looking still a little confused and still very serious. He raised his tired eyes to hers and within them flashed a tiny spark of recognition, that finally he was beginning to understand all. “Oh my,” he said, and she did not look away. The two held the mutual gaze for a long moment, one that Eleanor would cherish all her life, one that held within it all the depth of this extraordinary man’s music and the intimacy of a hundred lovers’ embraces.

Then the great musician smiled. “Thank you,” he said.

Gustav Mahler died in May of that year, back in his beloved Vienna in the presence of his beloved Alma.

Alma’s sitting room was like an island apart, untouched by the war and its aftermath. Her fresh beauty radiated as it had always, now with a slight matronly air, positive and glowing still, as if there had been no loss: no
daughter’s or husband’s death, no war, no influenza. She was still as striking and vibrant as ever. Eleanor was glad to see her again and buoyed by her cheerfulness as the two embraced at the doorway. The host reached down to caress Standish’s cheeks and offer, “What a handsome young man!” Standish smiled roughly at the attention, and the mother could see in an instant that her son had fallen, like so many men, into the thrall of this remarkably sensual woman.

“I visited Herr Mahler’s grave today,” Eleanor said.

Alma paused for a moment, surprised perhaps at such an opening line. “Oh, I am glad for that,” she said. “Gustav would have been greatly pleased.”

“It was a moment of great poignancy for me.”

“We both have experienced much since we were last together,” Alma said.

“I was happy for you when I learned of you and Herr Gropius,” Eleanor said.

“You do not think it was too soon?” She paused and looked away. “Some think I was disrespectful.”

“Life must go on,” Eleanor said, knowing that Arnauld called her actions predictable.

“You were kind to write. Such expression means a great deal, in times of joy and in times of loss.” Eleanor had written her twice. First, when Mahler died, and then upon the news of her marriage to the young architect Walter Gropius.

“You deserve to be happy.”

“We all deserve to be happy, although that is a difficult perspective to defend in these trying times.”

“This city has changed since our time here twenty years ago.”

“And we have changed,” Alma said with a knowing smile. “We have matured.”

“Still,” Eleanor said, “it is impossible not to notice that the city has become a grim place where there used to be such gaiety and life.”

“The war has terrible consequences, something we women would have predicted perhaps, had we been running things back then.”

Eleanor smiled. “That is a truth that perhaps history will record as tragic.”

“The war and the influenza,” Alma said, shaking her head. “The toll
has been unimaginable. I hear that Dr. Freud has lost his daughter.” Eleanor nodded. “Herr Mahler and I experienced that, you know. I think he never recovered. His heart was broken. You can hear it in his music.”

“My husband and I nearly lost our elder daughter,” Eleanor offered. “She was at death’s door with the flu. My husband nearly lost both of us.”

“I am so sorry,” Alma said. “I did not know.”

“It ended well. We both recovered.”

Alma looked distracted and distant for just a moment, her beautiful face locked in an instant in a frown. “I am glad for you. And for your husband. You know that we lost Klimt, Schiele, and Kokoschka. Two to sickness, and one to war.”

“Oskar Kokoschka?” Eleanor said. “I did not know.”

“Yes, on the Russian front. With Arnauld, I lost a dear friend, with Kokoschka, a lover.” It all seemed surprisingly easy for her to say.

“I am sorry to hear it. Kokoschka’s was a great talent. How exactly did it happen?”

“At the front. He was a cavalry officer, a very passionate and dashing one, you can imagine. In a way it was a relief. I don’t think he would have reacted well to my marrying Walter.”

Eleanor’s breath was taken away a bit by the ease with which her summary erupted and altered the mood of their exchange.

“That sounds cold, doesn’t it?” Alma said.

“I know that after a time one becomes inured.”